The future is arriving, and America is entering a new infrastructure age. Much of the political class is succumbing to a familiar temptation: slow it down by stoking fear of the unknown and imagining worst-case scenarios without acknowledging the benefits.

Nowhere is this clearer than with data centers. Across the country, local officials and community activists increasingly describe these facilities as threats to the electric grid, water supplies, and community character. In response, municipalities are turning to a usual toolkit of administrative resistance—emergency moratoriums, ad hoc zoning bans, and highly discretionary permitting loops designed to stop projects in their tracks rather than manage them.

This reactionary policymaking represents a fundamental misunderstanding about what a data center is and how it works.

Data centers are the railroads, power plants, and ports of the digital economy. They are the physical backbone of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, financial services, and nearly every modern enterprise. They do not merely serve “Big Tech,” but rather everyone who lives, works, learns, shops, banks, or communicates in the modern digital world.

The growth in demand is real. Artificial intelligence and advanced cloud computing require substantial power, land, cooling, and capital. Recognizing the physical constraints of this growth should not lead to the conclusion that data centers are villains.

We are choosing between two competing visions of the future:........

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