There are two major concerns surrounding new artificial-intelligence data centers that have been blown wildly out of proportion, thanks to a misinformation campaign by enemies of America and pro-regulatory Americans alike. It is important to set the record straight as these data centers continue to be built, especially as bipartisan concern continues to grow and moratoriums on their construction continue to be passed.

These two concerns mirror the long-debunked arguments about running out of finite resources in a multitude of ways. They revolve around the claim that data centers consume massive amounts of land, especially farmland, and require enormous quantities of water for cooling. 

According to AI researcher Andy Masley, the land-use issue is, in many ways, a manufactured one. By 2030, the total amount of land occupied by data centers will be roughly the size of Rhode Island. The buildings themselves, however, would fit within a midsized city. 

That is certainly a substantial amount of land, but not when compared with other uses that provoke virtually no public outrage. Thanks to government-subsidized corn farming used for ethanol production, inefficient corn-based fuel occupies an area roughly the size of New York State. In another case, the U.S. Department of Agriculture pays farmers to leave an area of farmland the size of Kentucky unplanted. 

Yet amid all of this obvious waste, food production has continued to increase, and no public outrage has erupted. Still, the public is being urged to panic over land being used for AI data centers.

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The land-use argument also ignores a basic reality: as humanity becomes more innovative, we learn to make smaller structures more efficient than the larger ones we began with, maximizing the use of available space. Yet critics seem unwilling even to concede that AI data centers are bound to follow the same trajectory. 

Now, onto water. 

Water concerns are more applicable when data centers rely on evaporative cooling, but still misinformed. First and foremost, the water is evaporated and, on average, returns to the Earth as rain within about nine days. There is no denying that this can affect water availability for a local community, but it also means there are ways to mitigate those effects that do not involve imposing moratoriums on data-center construction. 

The argument becomes even weaker when considering that most data centers rely on closed-loop cooling systems, which recycle water to cool their components. Across many facilities built by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, these closed-loop systems already rely on treated municipal wastewater, not water people need to drink.

Still, this can certainly affect areas already struggling with water scarcity or drought. But more often than not, responsibility for mitigating those risks falls on local governments and the terms they negotiate with a data-center company, not solely on the company itself. 

Water scarcity is a perfectly legitimate reason not to build a data center in a particular location. It is not, however, a reason to become reflexively anti–data center or to demand blanket moratoriums, especially when technology capable of cooling data centers with near-zero water use already exists.

What remains truly confounding is that, while organized and persistent opposition to AI data centers centers on water use, suburban sprinklers across the country use more water in two days than all U.S. data centers use in a year. In many cases, a single restaurant uses more water annually than a single data center, and golf courses do as well. Yet there are few, if any, comparable objections when those facilities are built in the same communities.

The debate over data centers has brought out some of humanity’s worst instincts: the impulse to regulate new technology, the mistaken belief that resources are finite and incapable of supporting progress, and the enduring lack of faith in human ingenuity and innovation, even in the greatest nation on Earth. 

The debate is far from over. But the push to build data centers will help usher in a new age of technological advancement and human flourishing. The choices we make now will determine whether America leads and controls that future, or whether it lets fear, bureaucracy, and manufactured scarcity hand that leadership, and those benefits to someone else.