Bombs and Porn Are Bad Reasons to Build More Data Centers

Is this big AI push supposed to help the U.S. kill more Iranian kids? To help school shooters kill kids at home? Or just to fill the internet with rubbish? We need better answers to this question.

Data center construction isn’t going as planned. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that nearly half of the 12 gigawatts in computing power worth of data centers planned for this year have been delayed or canceled. Just a third of those projects are currently under construction, the market intelligence firm Sightline Climate estimates in a forthcoming report. Less than a third of the 21.5 GW worth of data center projects announced for 2027 are currently under construction.

That’s thanks in part to shortages of electrical equipment like transformers and batteries. But many also face challenges from a growing, bipartisan backlash to data center construction. Maine’s legislature recently passed the country’s first-ever statewide moratorium on data center construction for projects over 20 megawatts, to last until November 2027. Similar bills have been introduced in at least a dozen states. The Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington voted by a margin of roughly 2-to-1 for a referendum requiring voter approval before the city can extend any preferential tax treatment to projects valued at or costing $10 million or more. The referendum was a reaction to the city approving tax incentives for a $15 billion data center project to be operated by Oracle and OpenAI. (That project will not be impacted by the vote.) In Festus, Missouri, last week, voters kicked out all four incumbents who’d voted to approve a $6 billion data center plan from the developer CRG.

Not all data centers are being built for AI hyperscalers. The International Energy Agency projects that roughly half of the electricity demand from new projects planned through 2030 will be for facilities equipped to meet needs for generative AI like ChatGPT, as opposed to the less energy-intensive data centers handling cloud storage and more traditional computing tasks. The upsides of those AI-specific projects aren’t self-evident, and there’s a growing divide between the glorious futures promised by big AI developers and what people see it actually doing—generating eerie school papers and TikTok content, for instance, or flooding X with AI-generated child pornography. In addition to concerns about rising electricity bills, air pollution, and noise, fights over data centers seem to be channeling deeper frustrations. What and whom, in other words, is all this stuff actually for?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year wrote that “the gains to quality of........

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