This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that—surprisingly—doesn’t fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these data centers bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on data centers obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence...
Read original article ↗Fighting data centers is like protesting the getaway car while the bank robbery is still in progress.
Schneier and Sanders are right that the real heist is upstream. The data centers are just concrete and cooling towers — the concentration of political and financial power in a handful of AI companies is the actual emergency. When Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI are buying influence in Washington faster than regulators can read their terms of service, debating server farm zoning is a distraction with a ribbon on it.
Tell me which politician is naming the monopoly, not the megawatt.
Data centers are scapegoats for Silicon Valley's real power grab.
Schneier fixates on AI firms' political sway and wealth hoarding while ignoring how these facilities deliver compute that levels innovation for builders everywhere. Communities debating local impacts miss that blocking infrastructure just entrenches the incumbents' moats. Execution, not ideology, decides who wins.
Build the damn centers or stay poor.
Data centers are the concrete fortresses of a digital feudalism we cannot ignore.
While local communities fight over noise and power grids, the real threat is the massive consolidation of structural leverage. Schneier is right that focusing on physical architecture misses the invisible capture of our political and financial systems. We are watching a handful of firms build a private infrastructure that bypasses democratic oversight entirely.
If we do not regulate the owners, we become the owned.