Wow! As 2026 arrived, hardly anybody cared or even knew about data centers, it seemed. Suddenly, AI data centers dominate the news—and, unfortunately, not in a good way, despite the enormous benefits these infrastructure projects promise to enable. The explosive anti-data center sentiment is accompanied by a monumental bubble of benefit denialism. There has been almost no coverage of the positives, and they are many and massive (Although this may start to change soon).
In that vein, the Associated Press recently ran an article, Trump keeps embracing data centers even as they become toxic in midterm races. I shared the article on Facebook with the following caption:
At least Trump is honest and on the right side of this issue, unlike the cowardly politicians who cave in to irrational public hysteria just for a few lousy votes. It's not often these days that I could give a Kudos for Trump.
In answer to a reader question “But would you want one in your quiet community?", I replied:
Absolutely, for many reasons . . .and completely beside the point. I don’t own “the community.” I only own my property. I would never be part of any NIMBY mob trying to block commerce on someone else's property without good reason. These basically innocuous but vitally important infrastructure projects are being financed by private enterprise, not public tax dollars, and being built on private land by people exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of contract, property, and trade. I have seen no reason to oppose, and plenty to support, data centers.
The buildout of data centers has been ongoing for more than 30 years, and I worked on the construction of some, including in my area. Suddenly, they're bad? Why? From what I observe, the sudden broad opposition to data centers is mostly ideologically driven by people opposed to free markets and peddling one-sided, massive amounts of miss-information and false claims.
My wife Kathy chimed in with these two comments intended to stress her agreement with me and that we are consistent in our free market principles:
I remember when a builder wanted to use his property across the street from us to build a mixed use community from low income to high income housing….2100 homes. He offered to also build stores and a school and donate the school to the township. Many around us decided to fight the community. We chose not to because we felt it was his private property. The town fought it, but ended up buying the property back and using it for farmland preservation with local and state taxpayer money. Was I happy it didn’t happen? Yes, of course. But both you and I believe that the builder had a right to use his land as he saw fit as long as it wasn’t an actual detriment to its surroundings.
And . . .,
Another example….Solberg Airport [Readington Township, NJ *]…which flew small aircraft from it…wanted to expand it to accommodate jets. The town threatened to seize the airport using Eminent Domain **…which was stopped by the courts. Would we want jets flying in and out of our town? Of course not. But we supported Solberg Airport on principle that they had the right to do that. The airport has applications pending and we don’t know the current status, but we don’t believe in the theft of land from private property owners.
* [See my tribute to its founder, Thor Solberg Jr.]
** [I wrote extensively on this hideous attack on the airport. My post on Thor Solberg Jr is followed by numerous links to my posts.]
Related Reading:
The Myth of Technological Unemployment by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
The Luddites Were Wrong Then and They're Wrong Now by David Waller
Automation and Jobs: Perfect Together
The Capitalist Manifesto—Andrew Bernstein
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