Old Man Pondering

Let me tell you something that is going to irritate a significant portion of my readership, and frankly I am looking forward to it. The collective meltdown—pun absolutely intended—over AI and data centers has reached a pitch I can no longer ignore. This is not a new phenomenon. When the cotton gin arrived, people lost their minds. When the automobile showed up, there were serious, published arguments that traveling faster than thirty miles per hour would cause the human brain to liquefy. We survived both.

The script never changes. Step one: new technology emerges. Step two: someone announces it will eliminate all jobs. Step three: someone else announces it will destroy all life. Step four: a movie comes out. I submit as Exhibit A the 1979 masterpiece of unhinged filmmaking, The China Syndrome, which had the spectacular timing to premiere almost simultaneously with Three-Mile Island and single-handedly convinced an entire generation that nuclear reactors were essentially slow-motion apocalypse machines. The United States has been paying for that cinematic hysteria ever since and literally fell decades behind other countries.

For the record: nuclear energy is among the cleanest power sources available to us. Nobody died at Three Mile Island. And a reactor cannot—I want to be very deliberate here—melt downward through the continental crust, navigate several thousand miles of liquid iron, and surface in Guangzhou. That is not how reactors work. It is also not how gravity works, or distance, or the earth.

Every generation gets its own monster under the bed, and the monster is always a new machine or technology. The fork, when it first appeared on European tables sometime around the eleventh century, was condemned by clergy as an affront to God, who had thoughtfully provided fingers for exactly this purpose. I would like to point out that the fork won that argument, and we have all been better fed for it.

The list of subsequent monsters is long enough to be its own data set: indoor plumbing, the telephone, the washing machine, the television, the personal computer, the laptop, nuclear power, solar panels. Each one arrived to a reception of genuine, documented hysteria. Each one was going to hollow out the workforce and leave civilization a smoking ruin. Each one instead created industries, expanded economies, and generated more employment than it displaced—outcomes that were perfectly visible in the data and perfectly invisible to anyone too busy catastrophizing to look.

Which brings me to AI, and to data centers specifically, a subject on which I am not speculating. I have been inside these facilities. I know the decibel ratings, the cooling systems, the energy inputs and outputs, the footprint on surrounding neighborhoods. I know this because in the early 2000s I oversaw the construction of one from the ground up. It ran without incident. The sky remained in place. The people nearby remain alive and to my knowledge, happy.

You’ve got to hand it to the New York governor: her AI data-center ban is like watching someone try to slap a mosquito with boxing gloves—utterly absurd and hilarious. New York boasts 132 data centers for a population of 20 million? Meanwhile, Texas with 461 and Virginia with 603, pay roughly half of New York’s eye-popping 29-cent-a-kilowatt-hour energy rate. Texas and Virginia also have had the largest energy increase in load (largely driven by data centers) but somehow have had the smallest rate increases. Ever wonder why? It’s not rocket science—unless the rocket landed in Albany.

Now, don’t get me wrong: data centers shouldn’t sprout like mushrooms next to your kid’s soccer field. Thoughtful planning is essential—nobody wants a row of servers blocking the sunset or turning the neighborhood into a hum-and-neon nightmare. But let’s be real: to compete with data-hungry nations like China, we’ll need thousands—no, tens of thousands—of these digital warehouses, because logic beats melodrama every time. China is rapidly expanding its data center infrastructure with a massive $295 billion, nationwide initiative and their infrastructure policy coordinates the needs of data centers with renewable energy buildout across eight official computing hubs and ten data center clusters.

The loudest objections to data centers tend to be about energy consumption, water use, and noise. These are the same objections raised against every significant business development in modern history—the Walmart, the distribution hub, the bakery that runs its ovens at four in the morning. City and county planners are not ignoring these concerns. They are running the same cost-benefit calculation they have always run and arriving at the same conclusion they almost always arrive at: that a business which pays for its water, pays for its power, employs people, and contributes to the tax base is, on balance, an addition to a community rather than a subtraction from it.

And while we’re on the subject of head-scratching opposition, let’s talk about the AI naysayers. They treat artificial intelligence like a runaway toaster that’s about to overtake humanity yet have zero clue how it actually works. AI is just a supercharged version of the problem-solving code we’ve been writing since punch cards were cool. It’s more creative than the thousands of algorithms already in place designed by human brains, but from cancer research to traffic flow to energy optimization, AI’s potential is enough to make virtual gaming look like a kid’s bike.

Fast forward 50 years, and people will snoop through history books and laugh—hard—at the anti-AI data center riots, just like we today chuckle at folks who once protested forks, telephones, computers, or nuclear energy. The data-center boom and AI revolution will spark fresh commerce, lower taxes, slash energy bills, and spawn jobs we haven’t even dreamed up yet. Heck, I just sent my grandson a link to become a certified AI engineer—because why wouldn’t you steer the next generation toward unstoppable future-tech?

Of course, the media will keep churning out melodramatic myths about “killer robots” and “server jungles.” But trust me: when reality bites, it bites in gigabytes, not gossip. So, to my conservative and liberal friends who roll their eyes at progress—give it a moment. Open a science journal, talk to a real engineer, or just wait fifty years and enjoy the show. You’ll be glad you did—unless you’re still trying to ban forks.

It’s important to call things as you see them, but the real challenge is seeing them accurately in the first place. After seven decades of study and research, observing how easily people are swayed by manipulation, I’ve come to a decision: it’s time to share undeniable facts. AI and the need to build data centers is simply inevitable!

The truth should always hold weight!