Data Centers

Data Center Savior

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Liz Wolfe | 8.27.2026 9:30 AM

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President Donald Trump loves a data center: Last year, the president signed an executive order that "expedites federal permitting, facilitates construction on federal land and makes qualifying projects eligible for financial incentives," notes The Washington Post. Trump is a huge fan, but much of the rest of his party reflects voters' fears that data centers will burden residential areas.

Data centers—the huge warehouses needed to store all the specialized hardware that's required to run AI models—have grown in salience as a political problem in recent months.

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Building out and using AI models at scale requires enormous computational demands; data centers, which consume large amounts of energy, are necessary to power these models. A huge data center could create demands that power grids weren't built for and can't effectively handle, leading to service outages for residential areas. It's also possible that costs of improving grids—to serve AI companies—could be passed on to households via rate increases paid by all customers.

That said, if we want more AI applications, and believe them to potentially be transformative, we're going to need more computing power. And we're going to need more data centers. (But you can perhaps understand why some people, when met with the "AI might render work as we know it obsolete" line, don't feel especially accommodating.)

"If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would........

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