As the United States races to build the infrastructure required for artificial intelligence, it faces a constraint: legitimacy at the local level. Data centers, transmission lines, and energy-intensive computing facilities have become strategic assets, central to economic competitiveness and national power. Yet they must be sited, permitted, and sustained in communities whose priorities do not always align with national ambitions. The result is a widening gap between federal technological strategy and the local governance structures responsible for implementing it.

This tension between national ambition and local authority is not universal. In China, for example, large-scale digital infrastructure is planned, permitted, and constructed through nationally coordinated processes that subordinate local opposition to state priorities. The Chinese Communist Party treats data centers, transmission corridors, and energy projects as instruments of national strategy rather than negotiated outcomes. That model carries its own political and social risks, concentrating burdens on communities that lack the freedom to contest projects or the legal and political mechanisms to hold planners accountable. But it confers strategic advantage: speed, scale, and predictability.

The United States, by contrast, must pursue comparable ambitions within a decentralized system that grants local governments veto power. If the country is serious about leading in artificial intelligence, it will need an institutional model that connects national ambition with local legitimacy. Without such a model, the physical foundations of AI leadership will continue to be contested one community at a time—and each new data center risks becoming another battleground in a broader struggle over how technological progress is governed. The pattern is increasingly familiar: a company proposes a facility, a community mobilizes in opposition, and the debate devolves into mistrust, rumor, and hardened positions. The outcome is not simply delay but a loss of confidence on both sides that makes compromise increasingly difficult.

The challenge for democratic institutions is not to imitate China but to adapt fast enough to sustain technological leadership. That requires treating local buy-in as an asset rather than a hurdle. U.S. regulators and developers must transform permitting from a single moment of consent into a sustained relationship. If they fail to make this shift, the United States risks a future in which projects stall in litigation, local resistance hardens into permanent opposition, and the country cedes an important strategic advantage to rivals willing to build without the public’s consent.

I have observed this debate not as a detached analyst but as a resident of Lansing, New York, where the energy and digital infrastructure company TeraWulf is seeking to develop a large data center campus supporting next-generation AI computing on the site of a retired coal plant. The proposal has drawn passionate support and opposition from local residents and officials.

Like many in the community, I value Cayuga Lake not as an abstraction but as something irreplaceable that we have a duty to protect. At the same time, the region’s economic realities are difficult to ignore: a shrinking tax base, aging infrastructure, and rising public costs that have strained local government for years.

As both a resident who would live with the project’s consequences and a tech policy scholar who studies the governance of digital infrastructure and has a background in environmental impact, I offered to conduct an independent assessment of the project’s likely effects on water use, power demand, employment, and the local tax base. (The company agreed and compensated me for the time required to conduct the analysis. It had no role in determining the scope of the study, conducting the research, interpreting the findings, or drafting the report, and it exercised no editorial control over the final product.) I found that the engineering, on its own terms, was sound. The proposed closed-loop cooling system would largely eliminate operational water withdrawals from Cayuga Lake, replacing the retired coal plant’s once water-intensive operations. Similarly, although the data center campus’s electricity demand would be substantial, the site already has considerable transmission infrastructure and........

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