A man at a county microphone holds up his phone and plays a clip of rooftop fans filmed from a highway shoulder, captioned with the claim that a proposed data center will run diesel engines around the clock, drain the aquifer, and raise every neighbor’s power bill by 40%. About 90 people sit through that Tuesday night; the coffee is terrible, and nobody in the room has measured a thing or opened a specification sheet. The clip has 3 million views, and the man holding the phone is sincere, frightened, and wrong in nearly every particular.
I have now watched versions of that meeting in Virginia, Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. The details change, and the script does not. Genuine local objections do not arrive pre-written. They name the parcel, the two-lane road, the elementary school, the creek that floods in April. What we are seeing instead is a portable liturgy, word-for-word identical in Loudoun County and in a Wisconsin township that has never hosted a single server rack, and portable liturgies have authors.
The Chinese Communist Party is racing to build the compute capacity that will determine whether the next century runs on American software or Chinese software. Every American megawatt that never gets built is a megawatt Beijing never has to outcompete. Russian and Iranian influence operations have spent a decade learning a cheap lesson: they do not need to persuade Americans of anything positive. They only need to make us afraid of our own construction sites. The same playbook was run against American natural gas, American nuclear power, and American pipelines, and it worked well enough in Europe that Germany dismantled a functioning nuclear fleet and then bought its energy from Moscow.
A foreign operation on its own would accomplish very little. Reach comes from a domestic amplification network that was already in place and already motivated to halt American industry. Professional climate advocacy needs a villain with a silhouette and a windowless building full of humming machines that photograph better than a spreadsheet. Climate shops will keep using that silhouette until the permits die, because a halted project is the outcome they came for. Degrowth theorists, campus anarchists, and the assorted socialist formations that have never once welcomed the expansion of an American industry supply the moral vocabulary, the phrases “extractive” and “sacrifice zone,” and the assumption that private capital building something large is presumptively a crime. Paralysis is the product they sell. Foreign services have no need to run these people and every incentive to hand them a graphic.
None of that makes the neighbors dupes. A homeowner who does not want a substation humming 200 feet from a bedroom window is being perfectly reasonable, and that concern is entirely fixable with enforceable standards rather than a blanket veto. The specific factual claims driving these campaigns are false; they are false in a patterned way, and that pattern always runs toward paralysis.
Activists treat AI servers as a uniquely dangerous class of machine, consuming and radiating far more than ordinary computing equipment. The claim sounds obvious and collapses the moment you supply a denominator. Dell’s PowerEdge R660 is a conventional 1U server, a box one rack unit tall, about an inch and three-quarters of cabinet height. Its published power supply envelope is 1,800 W, and Dell’s own manual lists a heat planning figure of 6,750 BTU/hr for that option. NVIDIA’s DGX H100, the machine activists hold up as the face of the AI buildout, is rated at a maximum system consumption of 10.2 kW and a system heat output of 38,557 BTU/hr. The 10.2 kW figure sounds nearly six times worse. But the NVIDIA chassis occupies 8U of rack height, and the Dell occupies 1U. Divide the power and the heat by the space each box actually takes, watts and heat per slice of rack rather than per whole chassis, and the Dell comes in at 1.800 kW per rack unit against NVIDIA’s 1.275, and 6,750 BTU/hr per rack unit against roughly 4,820. The ordinary server is about 41% denser in power and 40% denser in published heat than the AI appliance.
Those figures are vendor planning numbers, not utility meter readings. Dell states plainly that its heat figure is calculated from the power supply rating, and a redundant second supply does not mean the machine draws 3.6 kW all afternoon. Nameplate capacity is not consumption, at the level of the box or the campus. Actual draw depends on processors, memory, drives, fan speed, utilization, ambient temperature, and power management. When someone quotes a requested interconnection capacity as though the facility will pull that continuously from opening day, he is not reporting a fact. He is treating a ceiling as a load, and it is the same error every time.
Today’s data centers are not AI factories under any serious definition. The International Energy Agency, hardly a redoubt of American industrial boosterism, found that accelerated servers accounted for 24% of server electricity and 15% of total data-center electricity in 2024, and it projects that such machines will remain below 10% of the world’s physical server stock even in its 2030 base case. More than 90% of the machines in these buildings are running the boring, indispensable business of modern life: card clearing and payroll, hospital records and medical imaging, air traffic and phone routing, military communications, tax systems, disaster recovery, streaming libraries, and the cybersecurity that protects all of it. Calling every new facility an “AI factory” is like calling every interstate a racetrack because race cars also use pavement.
Scale gets the same arithmetic. Global data centers used about 415 TWh in 2024, roughly 1.5% of global electricity, projected to reach about 945 TWh, just under 3%, by 2030. In the US, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated 2023 consumption at 176 TWh, or 4.4% of national electricity consumption. Those are serious numbers that argue for building generation and modernizing the grid, and they fall well short of an imminent civilizational emergency. History already warned against this kind of extrapolation. A peer-reviewed 2020 analysis in Science found that global data-center compute instances grew by 550% between 2010 and 2018, while total electricity use rose by only 6%. Virtualization, better silicon, higher utilization, and migration into hyperscale facilities broke the assumed one-to-one link between digital work and power. Anyone who leaps from server counts to grid catastrophe is repeating a method that has already been falsified once.
These buildings make sound, as do hospitals, supermarkets, office towers, and any structure with mechanical equipment on the roof. The measurement that matters is whether sound at a legally protected receptor, meaning the property line or the nearest home, exceeds an objective limit after distance, enclosures, walls, berms, orientation, and scheduling are applied. Activists quote sound power levels measured inside a server hall, around 97 dB for a DGX system, as though that were the reading on a porch a quarter mile away, when the figure is an occupational reading for a room where workers wear hearing protection.
The diesel story is worse. Standby generators are, by design, idle. National Fire Protection Association guidance calls for weekly inspection and monthly exercise, and a typical test is 30 continuous minutes under load, which comes to roughly 6 scheduled hours per generator per year. Federal air rules cap qualifying maintenance and readiness testing at 100 hours annually, and that ceiling is routinely misquoted as though it described normal operations. Cummins sells 1- to 2-MW gas generator enclosures rated at 70 dBA at 23 feet, and EPA’s own free-field rule of about 6 dB of attenuation per doubling of distance puts that source near 46 dBA at 368 feet before a single wall, berm, or building shields it. Loudoun County already requires mechanical equipment to be enclosed and confines generator testing to weekdays between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. That is what a real solution looks like, and it did not recieve a fraction of the attention that the “24/7 diesel” caricature did.
Americans are being frightened out of owning the physical foundation of their own prosperity, their own privacy, their own national defense, and their own daily lives, and the people doing the frightening are not offering an alternative, they are simply relocating the asset, because global demand for computation does not fall when a Virginia supervisor votes no, it moves, and it moves to jurisdictions where nobody holds a hearing at all. A nation that will not house its own data does not become purer by the refusal, renting its cloud from someone else’s government, storing its citizens’ records under someone else’s law, and asking permission for capabilities it once owned outright, becoming a tenant in the process.
Every impact anyone has cited is an engineering or regulatory variable that can be measured, priced, mitigated, and enforced. Set a neutral property-line sound limit, require pre-construction modeling and post-construction verification, and apply the same rule to every industrial user in the county. Make the customer who causes a grid upgrade pay for it, which is precisely the structure the Ratepayer Protection Pledge advances. Then permit and build. Heritage Foundation analysts have argued that localities should seek regulatory clarity rather than moratoriums, and they are right because a predictable standard invites investment while giving neighbors something enforceable. Cato’s Scott Lincicome put the diagnosis bluntly: most of what people hate about data centers is either factually incorrect or misdirected. His colleague Travis Fisher supplied the governing principle. The thing to do is not to stop the fast-moving growth industry. The thing to do is to reform the slow one.
President Trump understood this when he signed Executive Order 14318, making rapid domestic buildout of data centers and their supporting energy infrastructure a stated national priority, a recognition that compute is now infrastructure in the same sense that rail, grid, and highway once were, and that a country which cannot build its own is not sovereign in any meaningful way. Conservatives who want standards rather than vetoes already have the instruments: a property-line limit, a ratepayer rule, and an order that treats the buildout as national business. Our adversaries grasp the stakes perfectly. Builders should be permitted to pour the concrete, and a country that can still build is a country that still owns its compute.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
X confirmed Chinese bot accounts are responsible for spreading anti-data centers propaganda.
I'm getting people on Facebook, where I've shared your other articles on this, telling me that these big, hulking, buildings will soon be obsolete, so then what? So? You've never heard of tearing down a building before? It's ridiculous the lame arguments they make.