In 2024, Donald Trump ran for president on revitalizing the American economy, on cutting taxes, restoring U.S. industry, strengthening national security, expanding reliable energy production, reducing red tape, and lowering costs for working families. His platform even called for once again making the United States a manufacturing superpower, a leading energy producer, and revitalizing America's infrastructure.

And yet the same platform is now being fought by more than 70 percent of Americans, in the form of an AI data center.

People may reject the package, but it is impossible to ignore the economic upside. Data centers have helped revitalize American manufacturing, the trades, and other blue-collar work. Their buildout will help keep the U.S. economy and defense industries miles ahead of foreign adversaries as more companies are founded and enter the market. They have reduced property taxes in the vast majority of areas where they have been built, while providing enough revenue to help revitalize towns hollowed out by offshoring and a declining manufacturing industry. They are also increasing demand for electricity, which will force the government to finally update and expand the country’s aging electrical grid.

And if you don't believe me, Elon Musk endorsed exactly that same message, sharing a post from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

So why do Americans broadly oppose data centers? 

Recommended
Here's the Line From a Lindsay Clancy Supporter That Truly Says It All Matt Vespa Democrats Did Not Just Say This About 9/11, Did They? Amy Curtis

Part of the answer is misinformation, including narratives amplified by Chinese state actors about water use, electricity prices, and land consumption. Part is a collapsing faith in free-market capitalism. Part is the public’s overwhelming distrust of Big Tech. And then there is AI itself. For many Americans, artificial intelligence represents an unknown future, and people tend to picture a Terminator-style killer robot before they picture any upsides generated by the new technology. 

Americans are entitled to demand that data-center developers be transparent, pay their way, protect local resources, and deliver tangible benefits to the communities hosting them. What they cannot reasonably demand is all the jobs, all the industrial capacity, all the cheap and reliable power, all the AI leadership, and none of the infrastructure.

America’s history is defined by people who chose to harness the future, not by those who concluded that the safest course was to preserve increasingly outdated arrangements and freeze the world in place. AI presents the country with that same choice. 

Technology does not inherently put life beyond human control. More often, it expands our capacity to shape the world around us, providing reliable power, clean water, modern medicine, faster communications, transportation, and access to information that earlier generations could scarcely imagine. Those gains are easy to take for granted in the United States. Billions of people in developing countries who still lack basic technology would likely recognize technological progress not as a loss of agency, but as one of the clearest means of gaining it. And just because AI is more complex, does not mean it is immune to this rule.

AI will reshape manufacturing, energy, labor, national security, and daily life whether Americans embrace it or not. The choice is not between change and no change. It is between helping set the terms of that change or leaving America’s future to the dictates of others. That should be an easy choice.