Insights from Nomad Futurist Fellow Prathyaj Mantha
Shunning data centers at home won’t halt their growth — it shifts vital infrastructure and jobs overseas, risking US security, oversight and economic opportunity.
Across parts of the United States, data centers are increasingly viewed as unwelcome neighbors: too loud, too energy-intensive, too water-intensive and disruptive to local character. But rejecting data centers does not reduce demand for them. It simply changes where that infrastructure is built.
If Maine rejects data centers, Texas will take them. If the United States passes legislation to block data centers, investment will move to countries such as India, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia, where the people are more than happy to invite them with tax incentives. This has a cost and is a missed opportunity. Data Centers store, process and transmit sensitive information are subject to the laws, governance structures and security frameworks of the places where they operate. Health records, financial transactions, cloud services and increasingly AI-enabled decision systems all depend on data centers. Moving infrastructure abroad can mean reducing domestic oversight and control.
Data centers are a matter of national security. Data centers are not passive warehouses; they are strategic infrastructure. Modern economies, government services and emerging AI capabilities depend on resilient computational capacity. Infrastructure located in jurisdictions with weaker governance, different strategic priorities or greater geopolitical uncertainty introduces operational and security risks that cannot be ignored.
This can also be a massive missed opportunity. Data center development supports construction, engineering, operations, energy and manufacturing jobs while generating local tax revenue and attracting long-term investment. They can be a driver for economic growth in any region.
Northern Virginia, which has the largest cluster of data centers in the world, is perhaps the best example. Global spending on data center infrastructure continues to accelerate and countries that welcome development will capture both capital and talent.
This is not an argument to dismiss environmental or community concerns. Those concerns are legitimate and require critical examination, scrutiny and mitigation standards.
The real choice is not data centers or healthy communities. It is whether this infrastructure is built domestically under American environmental and governance standards or elsewhere under someone else’s.
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