If you live near a military base, there’s a chance you’ll soon find that a privately owned data center has moved into your area. A year ago, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Defense to lease land to private developers for this purpose. “You can’t fight it,” Trump said this week of data centers, which have grown wildly unpopular.

Amid concerns about massive electricity use and pollution, data center buildout on military bases is happening at hyperspeed. In March of this year, two private developers—the Carlyle Group and CyrusOne—were selected to develop hyperscale data centers, built for cloud computing and AI, on federally owned land in Texas and Utah. The Department hasn’t explained where they’ll get their power, though—and as El Paso Matters reported recently, the proposed Texas data center alone could require more power than all of El Paso itself. And in May, the DOD asked for an additional $30 billion to build hyperscale data centers that would, according to Defense One, “integrate largely untested hardware and software used to make life or........

© Mother Jones