Edition 025: When the Structure is Changed

Many things have changed since I began. The clearest, and the one I did not expect, is that people have stopped accepting data centers quietly. When I started writing, the build-out felt inevitable, like the kind of thing this book keeps describing—a decision made somewhere else, by people who would never have to live next to it, presented to the rest of us as already settled. That is no longer how it is going. In the first three months of 2026, opponents reportedly blocked or delayed at least seventy-five projects worth around a hundred and thirty billion dollars, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to over eight hundred, spread across nearly every state.[1]

The data center resistance is bipartisan.[2] Activists like Erin Brockovich are tracking the development of these projects and reporting to the public on them.[3] Regular people are showing up to county meetings and saying no.[4] Much of this has been reported as populist anger,[5] but that is not what it is. People have looked at what a data center actually costs the place it lands in, the water, the strain on the grid, the higher electric bills, the people, and weighed it against what they were promised, which is usually a handful of permanent jobs and a tax base the data center is often exempted from anyway.[6] They have done the math, and the math does not work. Even more than that, the human cost is too great. That is not populism. It is pragmatism, and a correct reading of what is being taken and from whom.

The more striking change is what that pressure has done to the people who hold public office. Last November, Texas Governor Greg Abbott stood next to the CEO of Google to announce a forty-billion-dollar investment, calling Texas “the epicenter” of the data center boom.[7] In June, the same governor sent a letter to the state’s utility regulators directing them to make sure data center costs are not passed on to residential electricity customers, to require the centers to pay for their own electric infrastructure, and to repeal the sales tax exemptions and other incentives that drew the industry to Texas in the first place.[8]

I am not going to tell you Abbott had a change of heart. I do not know what is in his heart, but what happened is that the incentives changed. The political cost of being the governor who raised people’s electric bills to subsidize an unwanted industry came to outweigh the benefit of being the governor who landed the investment. That is the whole argument of this book running in reverse, for once in the right direction. The structure produced the outcome. When the structure changed, so did the outcome. The incentives moved because regular people moved them. By acting together, we can change what the system rewards.

But the largest lever remains in federal hands. The federal government’s posture is not hidden. In a speech at the Treasury, Secretary Scott Bessent named artificial intelligence a source of national power, set beside semiconductors and critical minerals, and argued that the country’s task is to write the rules and standards for emerging technology before its rivals do.[9] These comments come on the tail of a new executive order based on the same premise that the country leads because, in the order’s own words, it “refuse[s] to stifle innovation with overly burdensome regulation.”[10] What it does not do is consider the impact of AI on people and in the places where the machines land. It is written about the AI model and the U.S. market, not for the country that will carry the burden. And it represents a move the other way from Abbott’s letter—toward a single national standard that preempts the state and local rules that gave communities their only footing. The protection of the people is not currently in the federal frame; dominance is.

And here is the heart of it. The companies that own almost everything hold a power no person and no single town can meet on level ground. Exactly one institution is built to their scale—the federal government. That is why the fight over who governs AI is not a technicality. It decides whether the counterweight gets used at all.

But a government is not a fixed thing; it is a set of incentives wearing the face of whoever answers to them. And like every system in this book, the incentives count money and little else. Standing in his family’s cemetery an hour east of Oklahoma City, Chebon Kernell, a council member of the Seminole Nation, offered a different measure: “True wealth is the well-being of our families. True wealth is being able to live on this Earth Mother without fear and without having to look over one’s shoulders.”[11] It is the kind of wealth our system has not yet learned to count. The companies’ money can buy the infrastructure, the data, the processing, and—since Citizens United—a great deal of the politics too. But it cannot buy people who have decided to stand with each other. Across the country, the people packing county meetings and blocking projects have already proved this. Whatever officials felt about it, the pressure changed what it cost to ignore the people—and the incentives moved. The federal government can be moved the same way, and only that way. What money cannot buy is people who have decided that they, along with this Earth and their time on it, are each other’s wealth.

***

[1] Bain, Ben. “Data Center Opposition Is Sharply Rising in 2026, Study Finds.” NBC News, 16 June 2026, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/data-center-opposition-sharply-rising-2026-study-finds-rcna349728. Accessed 29 June 2026.

[2] Martinez, Alejandra. “Greg Abbott Recommends Data Center Industry Crackdown.” The Texas Tribune, 10 June 2026, www.texastribune.org/2026/06/10/texas-greg-abbott-data-centers-regulation-sales-tax/. Accessed 26 June 2026.

[3] Brockovich, Erin, Brockovich AI Data Center Report, https://brockovichdatacenter.com/. Accessed 9 July 2026.

[4]See Garcia, Tony, “Data Center Outrage: Hundreds Pack in to Protest during Hours-Long Meeting in Nashville.” MSN, 8 July 2026, www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/data-center-outrage-hundreds-pack-in-to-protest-during-hours-long-meeting-in-nashville/ar-AA27uvXB. Accessed 9 July 2026.

[5]See Lissner, Rebecca. "A Populist Backlash over AI Is Brewing in America." TIME, 11 Mar. 2026, time.com/7371825/trump-data-center-ai-backlash-ai-america-china. Accessed 9 July 2026.

[6] Green, Ben. “Why Are Communities Pushing Back against Data Centers?” Interview. The Harvard Gazette, 9 Apr. 2026, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/04/why-are-communities-pushing-back-against-data-centers. Accessed 29 June 2026.

[7] Lieber, Dave. “Data Centers Get Deals. Texans May Get Higher Electric Bills.” The Dallas Morning News, 13 May 2026, finance.yahoo.com/news/data-centers-deals-texans-may-132430442.html. Accessed 29 June 2026.

[8]See n. 1, above.

[9] United States, Department of the Treasury. “Remarks from Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent at The Economic Club of New York's America 250 Gala Dinner: American Economic Statecraft in the 21st Century.” 23 June 2026. U.S. Department of the Treasury, home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0539. Accessed 9 July 2026.

[10] United States, Executive Office of the President [Donald J. Trump]. Executive Order 14409: Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security. 2 June 2026. The White House, www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/06/promoting-advanced-artificial-intelligence-innovation-and-security/. Accessed 9 July 2026.

[11] Chen, David W. “Big Tech Is Now Targeting Native American Land for Massive Data Centers,” The New York Times, 9 July 2026, www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/us/data-centers-native-american-tribes.html. Accessed 9 July 2026.