The Data Center of Gravity

I

It's ten thousand years ago. You're one of the first farmers.

One morning, something's up with the irrigation canals. The water’s all cloudy and barely flowing. You walk to the riverbank and find the water lower than you’ve ever seen it. You set off for the nearby town to see if there's news. About halfway, you notice something else odd: the river is full and flowing again. Someone or something rerouted it.

In town, you learn what happened. The council of elders has seized the river’s water. "For a defense project," a merchant assures you. "Our whole region will be safer from marauders." You want your family to be safe. You want to believe the elders. Can you, though? They’ve been involved in some serious boondoggles. How do you know this project is truly preventing more harm than it causes? How do you know it’s not a front for greed? You don't. What you and your village need is a seat at the table; a say in the matter.

Ten thousand years later, we act like we have that. Do we? If not, is it because democracy is flawed as a concept? Or the opposite — that it’s especially valuable, and valuable things need maintenance, protection?

II

On the north shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the Stratos Hyperscale Data Center sits on a plot of land a third of the size of San Francisco. One thing it will do is emit waste heat that will quicken the lake's evaporation, and as the lake dries out, heavy metals on its floor will drift east and south, settling in soil and lungs. Another thing it will do, if its stated objectives are to be believed, is “strengthen military readiness and national security by supporting energy resilience, compute power, and data storage for defense operations.”

In Saline Township, Michigan, near Detroit, a new data center will use roughly the same amount of energy as a million typical households. Less than a year ago some economists said these things would reduce energy costs. That could, in theory, be the case under certain conditions: businesses paying up front, new tax structures relieving the strain on household customers. Neither is becoming the norm.

The largest supercomputer in the world is a data center recently constructed in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, just south of Milwaukee. In 2017, on that very site, developers wanted to put a Foxconn plant, claiming it would bring tens of thousands of jobs plus tens of billions of dollars in investment. It fell through, and expensively. The new data center has been successfully completed; the broader "data center fever" that it's part of promises roughly the same things. It does, in fact, provide the American construction industry with a brief influx of work. But there are clear early signs that the industry behind these things will be unable to deliver its hoped-for returns. Backed by corporate-government partnerships, their computing power will almost certainly be redirected, at least partly, toward other pursuits deemed necessary to national security, “too big to fail.”

In Virginia, known as “data center alley” long before this recent push, the decline in approval is like a cliff. The percentage of people there who feel "comfortable" with a data center being built near them dropped from 69% in 2023 to 35% in 2026. Across the country, $156 billion in potential investment in data centers was blocked or stalled by local opposition in 2025. This is unusual for us, like a cat panting; we only do this when very stressed. Charlie Berens, a Wisconsin comedian, said opposition to data centers has become "the most bipartisan issue since beer.” He may be underselling it.

III

Americans, as a rule, enjoy questionable business ventures, and the people who start them. Why the sudden hate for this? Why the seismic political change underneath it? Why do self-described MAGA voters, despite our president calling data centers “big strong bold money machines,” poll as more opposed to data centers by double digits than moderate Republicans?

Because, in a nutshell, the sound of data centers is the sound of a tree creaking after several wedges have been driven into it; or a pot of hot water in which small bubbles are appearing. For reasons I'm about to go into, the wheels of capital, after years of spitting out crises and easily re-digesting them, its stomach now soft from easy challenges, is spitting one out that has an unusually hard shell, a stone-like pit. Those same wheels defused the issue of fracking, turning it into a matter of partisan bickering quite easily; the same playbook is not working with data centers, and the reasons are plain if we dig only a little.

Data centers throw elbows into the sore spots of every side. For conservatives: who's this freeloader coming in, eating up energy and subsidies, doing jack for my family and community? For the left: who's this greedy corporation replacing workers, degrading the environment? For everyone, “apolitical” or not: what's making all this racket, driving up my electricity costs? You may not be interested in data centers but data centers are keenly interested in you, your utility bill, your location history. Thus, many people who previously thought about politics in terms of election years and TV anchors now see it interrupting their lives and neighborhoods, off the usual schedule. They are displeased.

Bringing this all together with glossy wrapping paper and a big red bow is a wider narrative, too shiny and irresistible. Consider: in the mid-20th century, when new infrastructure was on the table, the government would say: gee whiz, whaddya need? Roads? Schools? By gosh, let's do it. Then it turned into things like oil pipelines or the Internet: a mixed bag, mostly carried out by anonymous nerds and bureaucrats. Oh, but now? "Here's a data center, fuck you." And the people behind it are not shadowy nobodies; they are tech CEOs from the news, hawking the latest technologies with one hand, shredding the social fabric with the other, flipping off normies – "the permanent underclass," they say on the app formerly known as Twitter – with a robotic third arm. Though Americans love shady business ventures, we especially love a good David and Goliath story. We are drawn to them like pie on a windowsill.

And so no single problem with these things, if solved, would suddenly make them palatable. Energy costs, noise, whatever. No particular change to the "defense project" in question, be it in that neolithic farming town or the Stratos facility in Utah, will suddenly put people’s minds at ease. Data centers are “natural” outgrowths from the concepts of “computers” and “business,” which Americans are not quite ready to give up; this makes them both particularly difficult to fight off in a permanent way, and also particularly difficult to paint as a non-issue even to the Republican base. Any attempt to fix these issues in a one-off, piecemeal way would be like flying alongside a spear hurtling at a hundred miles an hour, sanding down a corner of it, and claiming "crisis averted." No; a bigger story is pulling these colliding issues together. The backlash, likewise, is not a single phenomenon, a rogue wave, but a handful that have traveled for miles to meet here and now.

IV

America wanted to relax. We surrounded ourselves with machines that do work for us. Now we have AI. America wanted comfort. We surrounded ourselves with machines that use oil and chemicals to make life nice. Now we have hotter weather. America wanted rights more than it wanted obligations. When we have to work through those – the conflicting needs and priorities of others – it makes us less relaxed and comfortable. So we set up machine-like institutions to “take care” of all that. Now we have authoritarianism.

Data centers are, in essence, all three of these things converging in a uniquely visible way: resource-hungry computers, built against people’s wishes. These are physical sites, altars of a twisted sort, where Americans can play out an irresistible plot: try to turn back the clock on all three problems at once. Of course it feels good to resist them.

But turning back the clock is impossible. No single one of us, no matter how many Amazon orders we’ve made, signed off on those problems in full; but we did in part, and that’s all it took. The forces behind data centers are not alien. They are fully homegrown. They form a “center of gravity” of American habits and desires, like a black hole. Data centers are not the center of it; they are simply the most visible thing falling into the center. To stop a data center, to stop things from falling into this black hole, is one battle, and to unmake the forces that have led to its creation is another. The black hole comes from our collective unwillingness to tolerate discomfort, to repair what’s broken, to maintain what’s important, and our eagerness to turn to the new and enticing, distracting ourselves from those things.

It may be asking too much of America to wage both battles at once, but anyhow, that’s what’s demanded. Nature has never designed her challenges according to our whims and she seems in no mood to start now.

The question, as it was ten thousand years ago, is to what extent we will choose to answer it together or on our own. One is objectively more effective, as that lone farmer from ten thousand years ago will wistfully tell you.