Don’t Make Data Centers the Scapegoat for Our AI Anxieties

Some of the concerns from communities about the adverse impact of data centers on their communities are valid and need to be addressed by local leaders. Other concerns about data centers are proxies for larger debates about the role of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as retrospective and prospective battles about the place of technology in our daily lives.

Regardless, AI is thankfully here to stay, and data centers are needed to power this empowering technology. Data center growth should not be held hostage to broader and dubious concerns about AI, or to concerns about how unrelated technologies developed in the past.

The use of technology has accelerated over the last thirty years. It is difficult to function in our society without hardware to access it — usually in the form of a smartphone —and it is difficult to accomplish daily tasks without technology — from grocery store visits to medical appointments.

The ubiquity of digital platforms has created resentment in some quarters about where they are deployed and who ultimately controls access to them in our schools, kitchen tables, and workplaces. In many respects, data centers are the ultimate symbol of the technological age we live in.

Data centers are, for some, a physical symbol of anxieties about AI and a daily reminder of how quickly AI may change our society. These fears, while understandable, should not be allowed a veto over progress in almost every aspect of our lives.

The major conflicts have been and will continue to be fought over religion, territory, and ideology. A new and wide battlefield of this century will be AI. China is trying to undermine American leadership in AI because of our technological advantage and because AI is a contested space in which great powers now fight. There is evidence that China is seeking to exploit differences in American opinion to slow the development of American AI infrastructure.

To slow down or halt American data centers would be advantageous to our geopolitical competitors and injurious to American technological development, to say nothing of the damage it would do to our medical care, factories, research universities, and many other assets that help Americans every day.

Shockingly, some American lawmakers support a moratorium on data centers or efforts to radically restrict their construction and use. Those efforts will directly hobble the advancement of AI in the United States.

For some, that would be a welcome development.

It would be an unfortunate outcome for Americans who rely on AI for life-saving and life-enhancing medical advances. It would be a dangerous result for our national security, which increasingly relies on AI for intelligence analysis, cyber defense, and military logistics. Supporting a slowdown of AI and capping data center growth will deny our warfighters the essential tools they need at a pivotal point in history. That analysis isn’t fear-mongering. It is a simple fact.

All technologies cause displacement. We can recall the rampant and damaging pollution caused by factories as they came online at scale last century, for example. But no reasonable people called for halting automobile or airplane construction, or shutting down the vast manufacturing plant of the United States.

Factories got more efficient, generated less pollution, and still powered the economy.

Likewise, data centers will become denser, their technology will improve, and they will consume fewer resources. AI is in its infancy.

The data center technology supporting AI specifically is also new. Data center technology is scaling. Communities that host them will benefit even as they consume more data as they use AI more often.

It is perfectly reasonable and a responsibility of policymakers to consider the current impacts of data centers on communities. It is paramount that, when those considerations are made, the same policymakers have a holistic view of why AI matters now and in the future, of how data centers will improve and shrink over time, and of the real implications of impeding data centers for American global competitiveness.

When this farsighted approach is taken, data centers will continue to expand and as their individual footprints shrink. They will power the AI that will cure diseases, create new start-up businesses and jobs, and make the complex easy, and handle the routine tasks that take up so much of our daily lives, freeing up our energies for more fulfilling tasks.

In the meantime, we need to resist the understandable urge to take out our anxieties about the AI future out on data centers. That solves nothing. It only pauses the incredible advances AI brings every day. Americans lose when this happens. And that means our competitors who get the balance right between data centers and local communities win at our expense.

Neil Siefring is a Senior Fellow at the Alliance for the Future.