Rich Lowry of National Review Online assesses the recent public outcry against data centers.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stole the show at a recent congressional hearing with two jars of brown water.
She explained that the dirty water had come from Morgan County, Ga., where a Meta data center is tainting the water of local residents.
It was an image perfectly suited to driving the intensifying opposition to data centers in that it was photogenic, easy to understand — and misleading.
According to reporting in the New York Times last year, the water problem has affected four homes in the vicinity of the data center, not the entire county, as AOC implied. It stands to reason that the construction of the data center disturbed the private wells of these homes (the problems started when Meta broke ground), but that could happen with any construction project.
As a gesture of goodwill, Meta should replace the wells, but the PR damage has already been done.
The growing animus to data centers is as irrational as the campaign to stop nuclear power, which had considerable success, to our detriment to this day.
At least nuclear power has had real accidents, although the one in the United States, Three Mile Island, was ultimately of trifling significance. There has been no data center equivalent of Chernobyl or Fukushima, and there never will be.
The opposition to data centers is what you might call a moral panic, except there is nothing moral about potentially sabotaging the U.S. in the AI race with China based on misunderstandings and lies.
Data centers have been with us for a long time, powering the internet and cloud computing. They’ve kicked into overdrive, though, with the rise of AI, which depends on large-scale computing power. The centers don’t need many people to operate them, but they create lots of construction jobs and contribute massive tax revenue to the places where they are located.
What’s not to like? Well, they require lots of energy and water, and this is presumed to strain local communities and drive up rates for everyone else.
The evidence doesn’t show much effect on the price of electricity, though.
