Artificial Intelligence

The Joys of Data Centers: Debunking the Backlash Against the $7 Trillion AI Building Boom

Contrary to the claims of the not-in-my-backyard technophobes, all this growth comes with minimal environmental downsides.

Christian Britschgi | From the April 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

Sen. Bernie Sanders has a problem with data centers. They're just too good.

In a video posted to social media in December 2025, the Vermont independent complained that billionaire tech moguls are reaping huge profits from their data center investments while the technological innovations these facilities power will automate away countless jobs currently done by human workers. He called for a federal moratorium on data center construction to "give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing."

By 2030, companies are projected to invest as much as $7 trillion on building or updating the boxy, server-filled facilities that keep the digital cloud aloft and train large language models to speak intelligibly. About 40 percent of that spending will happen in America.

Sanders is hardly alone in complaining about America's staggering data center boom.

As 770 data centers enter the development pipeline, a chorus of usual suspects is demanding they be stopped. Environmentalists complain that they are gobbling up virgin land and drinking all of the water. Preservationists say these boxy facilities are ruining the character of local areas. Consumer advocates say their power demands are raising everyone's electricity bills.

In Sanders' case, his complaints about data centers tacitly accept the premises of the people investing huge sums in them: that these facilities will be fabulously profitable investments that spur the development of the innovative, labor-saving technologies of the future. But the socialist senator thinks that's a bad thing. After all, no government bureaucrat has precisely planned where all this economic dynamism will take us.

The rest of us should be able to see the tremendous upsides of the country's data center boom. Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics could liberate humanity from boring, backbreaking labor. The early profits of data center development are a leading indicator of the increasingly productive economy that awaits us in the years to come.

While the rest of the economy wobbles under the weight of trade wars and other forms of government intervention, data center investment is almost exclusively responsible for driving GDP growth.

Contrary to the claims of the not-in-my-backyard technophobes, all this growth comes with minimal environmental downsides. Data centers consume a tiny portion of the nation's water. While they're not the prettiest buildings to look at, they mean less noise, fumes, and traffic than almost any other land use one could care to name.

Their power consumption is gargantuan. But data centers' electricity demands are also driving secondary innovations in the world of energy efficiency and power generation.

In short, it's hard to imagine an industry that gets more juice from the olives it squeezes. Data centers are the silent, uncomplaining Atlas holding our dynamic, tech-driven economy on his mighty shoulders. They don't produce rainbows (yet). But they might as well. We should all stop worrying and learn to love them.

Building Boom and Backlash

The internet isn't a series of tubes. It's a series of warehouses filled with computing equipment in Loudoun County, Virginia.

The suburban jurisdiction just outside the Washington Beltway is home to 200 data center facilities with a physical footprint of 47 million square feet. The wider Northern Virginia region hosts some 13 percent of the entire world's data center capacity, supporting a huge percentage of global internet activity. When Amazon Web Services' data centers in the area experienced a brief disruption in late 2025, everything from Venmo to the British government's tax services went down.

It's fashionable to complain that America is a "build nothing" country. Loudoun County shows how much matter we can add to meatspace when the law allows it.

In 2000, the county's........

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