Who Pays for America's AI Arms Race?

The physical infrastructure behind artificial intelligence is consuming land, water, electricity and public resources while concentrating power in the hands of corporations and government institutions—and many communities are discovering the plans only after the machinery is already in motion.

For decades, we've been told that protecting the environment requires personal sacrifice. Turn off the lights. Take shorter showers. Recycle. Drive less. Reduce your carbon footprint. Protect open space.

Yet governments across the United States are approving massive data centers that consume billions of gallons of water, require enormous amounts of electricity. The proposed 40,000-acre Stratos AI campus in Utah, for example, is projected to require approximately 9 gigawatts of power at full buildout—more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes. They operate 24 hours a day, occupy thousands of acres/miles, and receive billions of dollars in tax incentives.

If environmental stewardship truly matters, why aren't these projects being held to the same level of scrutiny and accountability that ordinary citizens have been asked to accept for decades?

What we are witnessing is not the ordinary growth of the internet. Other technologically advanced countries operate modern banking systems, hospitals, communications networks, businesses and high-speed internet without building data centers on anything approaching the American scale; the United States hosts far more data-center infrastructure than any other nation.

The real force behind the current boom is a corporate and geopolitical race to dominate artificial intelligence. The largest cloud and AI companies are competing to secure computing capacity, electrical power, land, water, specialized chips and government support before their rivals do. Federal policy now openly treats data centers, semiconductor facilities and the energy infrastructure supporting them as strategic assets, while recent federal actions have sought to accelerate their permitting and construction.

This is not a response to ordinary people demanding thousands of new places to store photographs or stream movies. It’s the construction of the physical machinery required for corporations and governments to expand AI into commerce, defense, intelligence, surveillance, medicine, education, employment, finance and public administration.

The data-center boom is the physical foundation of a much larger transfer of resources and power—and the public consequences extend far beyond water and electricity.

The Pattern of Secrecy

The pattern has become disturbingly familiar:

•      Confidential negotiations
•      Code names
•      Non-disclosure agreements
•      Shell companies
•      Large tax-incentive packages
•      Land quietly assembled
•      Utilities brought into planning
•      Then the public learns about it

Investigations have documented local officials signing NDAs with developers, projects operating under code names, shell companies obscuring the identity of the corporation involved, and land options securing property before meaningful public review. One investigation of 30 projects reportedly found NDAs in a majority of the cases examined, concealing basic information about potential data centers, code names and corporate entities.

By the time residents hear what's being planned, the project already carries enormous momentum: landowners have signed agreements, developers have invested money, utilities have discussed electrical and water requirements, officials have negotiated incentives and political promises have been made.

The public may eventually receive a hearing, but that’s not the same as entering the process at the beginning. They are arriving late, by design. Their role was never truly to decide whether the project belonged in their community. Their role was to fight over the conditions under which they would be forced to live with.

Public anger cannot be dismissed as resistance to progress! People are watching decisions that will permanently alter their homes, health, landscape and cost of living. If these projects are unquestionably beneficial to the communities hosting them, why have secrecy, confidentiality agreements, unnamed buyers and concealed negotiations been so useful to the industry?

 

A Transfer of Electricity

The electrical demand is staggering, not a minor increase in commercial energy use. (Some estimates are a 100% increase in electric bills!) It’s a redirection of national generating capacity toward privately controlled computing infrastructure and the question is, who receives priority, pays for the infrastructure and bears the risk?

Water for Machines

Data centers produce large quantities of heat, and that heat must be removed continuously. This is not simply a technical question about cooling efficiency, it’s a question of priority. During droughts, heat waves or fires, who should receive limited water capacity? Families? Farmers? Local businesses? Rivers and ecosystems?

Or industrial computing facilities operating for the benefit of some of the wealthiest corporations in history?

Residents are justified in asking what will happen to aquifers, municipal capacity, wells, water pressure and future development when enormous industrial users are granted long-term access to local supplies.

They are also justified in demanding disclosure of cooling chemicals, wastewater composition, spill-prevention plans, fuel storage, transformer oils, battery systems and the potential routes by which contamination could enter soil or water. Whatever happened to the environmental assessments we used to require?

When Industrial Chemicals Become Human Biomarkers

The risk of contamination varies by facility, chemical, design and local geology. But cooling-water additives, fuels, lubricants, transformer fluids, battery materials and firefighting chemicals are real industrial substances with real pathways into soil, air, surface and ground water when spills occur. Cooling systems commonly require biocides, corrosion inhibitors, scale-control agents, dispersants and pH-adjusting chemicals.

This is where my work interpreting environmental-toxin laboratory testing becomes directly relevant. These laboratories measure chemicals—or their metabolites—inside human blood or urine. The reports I see commonly identify evidence of exposure to substances such as PFAS, bisphenols, phthalates, pesticides, volatile organic compounds and toxic metals.

These chemicals do not remain politely outside the body. Some PFAS have been associated with effects involving the liver, immune system, cholesterol, pregnancy outcomes and certain cancers. Firefighting foams are a recognized source of PFAS, making the enormous emergency-suppression systems required at electrical, fuel-storage and battery installations part of the contamination discussion—not an irrelevant detail.

Transformer and electrical infrastructure also deserve scrutiny. Transformers hold substantial quantities of insulating fluid that can contaminate soil or groundwater. Large battery systems introduce additional metals, electrolytes and fire-suppression demands, while diesel storage and backup generators bring petroleum compounds into the same industrial footprint.

The larger reality is that Americans are already carrying measurable mixtures of industrial chemicals. 

The Noise Never Stops

Data centers operate continuously. Their cooling fans, air chillers, pumps, transformers and ventilation equipment do not stop at night. Residents describe a persistent mechanical hum, low-frequency drone, vibration or pressure that enters homes and continues through the night. Environmental and community reporting has documented complaints of headaches, nausea, vertigo, sleep disturbance, ear pain and elevated stress among people living near facilities.

There are no quiet hours, no weekends or holidays, and the people living nearby cannot shut it off.

The Land Grab for AI

Hyperscale data-center campuses require far more than the footprint of the main buildings. They bring substations, transmission corridors, roads, security fencing, generators, cooling equipment, stormwater systems and industrial lighting. Farmland, forest and open space are being treated as vacant inputs for a computing economy.

Residents are not unreasonable for objecting to an eyesore that replaces the landscape they chose to live near. They are not selfish for resisting a project that changes rural land into an industrial campus. They are not uninformed because they value quiet, darkness, farmland, wildlife or a view that cannot be recreated after construction.

Public Subsidies, Private Control

The public is being asked to support projects in several ways at once:

•       Through tax exemptions.
•       Through public infrastructure.
•       Through utility expansion.
•       Through water-system capacity.
•       Through road construction.
•       Through environmental sacrifice.
•       Through loss of tax revenue that might otherwise support schools, emergency services or local needs.

And what do communities receive in return?

The Human Cost Is Powerlessness

Corporate announcements speak of innovation, investment, competitiveness and national leadership.

Residents speak about being blindsided, sleepless nights, vibrations, wells, traffic, industrial lighting, lost views, declining property values, strained infrastructure and fear that the place they call home is being taken from them.

They attend meetings, organize neighbors, gather evidence, submit petitions, hire lawyers and demand answers. Yet they are confronting multinational corporations with enormous legal and political resources, often alongside governments that have already decided the project represents progress.

The public has not objected quietly. Community resistance has delayed, altered or stopped billions of dollars in proposed projects, and opposition has spread across political and geographic lines. In July 2026, opponents reportedly staged 142 protests across 42 states, focusing on water, environmental impacts, transparency and community control. A Reuters/Ipsos poll cited in the coverage found that only 14 percent of respondents supported having a data center in their own community!

This is not a fringe reaction. It’s a warning that the public increasingly understands what is being taken from them.

This Is Not “Better Data”

The industry’s language obscures the real question. These facilities are not being built because Americans lack functioning internet, adequate email storage or the ability to conduct ordinary digital business. Other nations provide advanced communications, modern commerce and public services with far less physical data-center infrastructure.

The boom is being driven by corporations and governments that believe control of AI computing will determine future economic, military and political power.

That is their race.

The environmental costs, however, are being assigned to everyone else. Americans did not vote to devote a rapidly expanding share of the electrical grid to artificial intelligence. Communities did not ask for aquifers and water systems to be redesigned around machine cooling. Families did not request industrial campuses beside their homes. Workers did not demand the construction of publicly supported systems intended, in part, to automate their jobs and intensify surveillance.

The Infrastructure of Control

Data centers are the physical backbone of systems increasingly capable of monitoring behavior, mediating communication, automating decisions, shaping access to information, and reducing the need for human labor. The same companies building this infrastructure already exercise enormous influence over communication, commerce, employment, entertainment, software, cloud services and information distribution.

More computing capacity means more power, and who must pay for it. Land, water, electricity, tax revenue and public infrastructure are being reorganized around systems that will largely remain under private corporate control -- but the public is expected to supply the resources and live with the consequences.

The data-center boom is being presented as the unavoidable price of progress. But a society that strains electrical grids, redirects water, industrializes communities, subsidizes private infrastructure and concentrates unprecedented power in a handful of corporations has not yet established that it is progressing. It has only established that the machines are getting what they need.

And the human question remains unanswered....Progress for whom?