Let's Talk About Data Centers Like Adults

This should be fun. Let’s talk about data centers. Like adults.

It seems like whenever anyone talks about one – they’re picturing a warehouse full of chatbots.

And sure, they do power those. But the data center streaming your Netflix or YouTube, backing up all those emails you haven’t opened, managing your bank account, streaming your video games, holding your medical records, your tax return, the GPS routing your ambulance, the inventory system that tells the pharmacy whether your prescription’s in stock, the billions of junk emails, the real-time ad auctions that fire every time a webpage loads, the tracking pixels following you around the internet – or the entire internet itself – that’s the same building.

Not to mention crypto, smart appliances, any device that runs your lights or alarms, cloud storage, etc., etc., etc.

If you use any social media, Microsoft or Google Workspace, if you stream music, use an ATM, buy an airline ticket, use Uber, use Zoom, file your taxes online, or text someone – all of that and 1000 other things are using data centers.

The real issue is that we built a country that runs on these buildings, and we’ve been dragging our feet on real infrastructure upgrades for decades – and now AI walked in and made the bill come due all at once.

Data centers accounted for about 4.4% of US electricity in 2023. By 2028 that’s projected to hit somewhere between 6.7 and 12%. And the grid is not ready – a data center can go up in 18 to 24 months, while getting new power hooked into the grid can take three to seven years in some regions.

And I get it – when your bill goes up, the instinct is to blame the AI. Fair. But you can’t actually unplug it. AI is baked into fraud detection on your debit card, the logistics that move groceries, and the systems hospitals use to read scans. There’s no switch labeled “turn off AI” that doesn’t also turn off a hundred boring things you use every day without noticing. Wishing it away isn’t a real solution.

And we haven’t even touched on how much the government uses AI for surveillance.

Meanwhile, when it comes to power – China is just – building.

Since 2021, they’ve added more power generation than the United States has in years. In 2024 alone, they added 429 GW of new capacity – more than the US puts on the grid across several years combined. Wind and solar were 83% of it at 356.5 GW – 277 GW solar and about 80 GW wind. The rest was a mix of new thermal plus a small slice of hydro and nuclear.

They’re not having our argument. They decided power was the whole game and went and got it, fossil and renewable both, because they’re not precious about it.

And we went the other direction on purpose.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed the clean energy credits. Analysts at the Center for American Progress estimate it wipes out roughly 500 gigawatts of wind, solar, and battery capacity that was supposed to come online this decade – nearly 40% of the entire current US grid, gone off the planning board.

The Interior Department then handed down a “capacity density” rule that judges wind and solar on federal land by how much power they produce per acre – a standard built to disqualify them, since renewables spread out and fossil plants don’t. We are choking off the cheapest, fastest new power we can build at the exact moment demand is spiking. On purpose.

This is the part nobody running for anything wants to say out loud, so I’ll say it. The data center problem is really a 40-year infrastructure problem. We stopped building at scale decades ago and have been coasting on a flat demand curve. AI didn’t break the grid. AI is just the first thing big enough to make everyone notice it was already broke.

I think AI should be highly regulated.

I think data centers should be highly regulated.

I’m not anti-AI, because that position just doesn’t make sense to me. The government is not going to quit using it – believe me – so why would we argue it should be taken away from citizens? I see it as the same argument as the Second Amendment. I hate guns – but I also don’t believe the government should be allowed to have guns while citizens can’t.

Most people, including me, think we should have stricter gun laws. Does it matter? NOPE.

The fight for AI regulation is going to be just as hard. Because – like pillar one of my platform says – the system is broken, and before we can do anything else, that has to be addressed.

So what does a member of Congress actually do here, because I’m allergic to people promising things the job can’t deliver.

Federal is where the big levers are. But we need a massive blue wave to restore the clean energy tax credits the megabill killed – Casten and Levin already have a bill to do it. We need to fund FERC and the Department of Energy to fast-track transmission, because the bottleneck isn’t generators sitting idle, it’s the years it takes to connect them. We need real efficiency and water standards for data centers as a condition of federal benefit, so the industry spiking demand has skin in producing the supply.

And we need to make it easier for renewable energy to get the green light. We already have the technology for better, cheaper energy – but the old guard won’t get a clue.

Either way – Congress can’t close down the xAI plant in Memphis or approve a data center in Maury County. That’s state and local laws. The city is the one that fumbled the ball on that deal.

The state of Tennessee controls utility regulation, permitting, where these things get built, and who eats the cost. So the state has to stop letting data centers hook into the grid and pass the bill to regular ratepayers – if a company wants the power, it needs to build or pay for the generation.

Cities have to write zoning and water rules before the buildings show up, not after. And TVA, which most of this district runs on, has to actually plan for the load. TVA says data centers hit 18% of its industrial load in 2025 and expects that to double by 2030 – the current and requested data centers in Tennessee are expected to draw the equivalent of powering 6 million homes. They’re now scrambling to build 6.2 GW of new generation, the biggest capital program in TVA’s history, and floating a separate rate class so the rest of us don’t eat the cost.

Local opposition is already a force – around $98 billion in data center projects got blocked or delayed by communities in a single quarter of 2025. People aren’t wrong to fight a project that jacks their bill and drinks their water. But “no” isn’t an energy strategy any more than “turn off AI” is. You can win the fight against one warehouse and still lose the decade.

The pragmatic version is unsexy, and it’s the only one that works.

AI is here, it’s load-bearing, and it’s not leaving. The grid is old, and we spent 40 years not fixing it. China’s lapping us because they treated power like the prize, and we treated it like a culture war. Build the power. Make the industry pay for the power.

The world is changing. There is NO stopping it – but we’ve been here before.

The first power grids went up in the 1880s. Edison’s Pearl Street Station fired up in lower Manhattan in 1882 and lit a few dozen buildings, and within a generation, we’d strung wires across a continent that had spent all of human history lit by fire. Nobody voted on it. It just happened, the way the railroads happened, the way the factories happened.

And yeah – it fucked stuff up on the way. The Industrial Revolution that built the grid also built the company town, the twelve-hour shift, the kid working a loom, rivers you could light on fire, air in Pittsburgh and Manchester thick enough to chew. But the technology arrived whether anyone liked it or not.

What we actually got to decide – the only thing we ever get to decide – was the rules. Child labor laws. The eight-hour day. The Clean Air Act, a century late. Every one of those was a fight, and every one of them came after the damage, never before.

That’s the whole pattern. The machine shows up. It wrecks things while everyone argues about whether it’s really here. And eventually, we write the rules that should’ve come first.

AI and the data centers feeding it are the machines this time. It’s here, it’s drinking the power, it’s using the water, and pretending we can send it back is the same fantasy as telling Edison to unplug Manhattan.

Let’s Talk About Data Centers Like Adults

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