Alex argues that U.S. adversaries may be deliberately fueling public backlash against data centers through misinformation, exploiting America's decentralized siting process. The White House hasn't pushed back, though Mark Zuckerberg recently released a video framing data centers as community assets. Better communication from government and companies could counter these foreign-influenced narratives.
Chapters
There are a number of US adversaries who would love nothing more than to slow down America's data center buildout. We talk about at least one of them all the time on this pod. So my concern would be that we look back in a year or two and see that some quantum of this opposition to data center construction is actually the result of popular sentiment being stoked by foreign adversaries.
Okay, agreed, Alex, but you can countervail that. When I was on with Michael Kratios, I said, Why isn't the White House getting out in front of this? It's an issue that is gaining steam. People can see this. The second thing is, this is what Zuck said in his video last week. Give you better schools. We're gonna give you better access to jobs. We're gonna be a positive contributor to the community. You can get to a point where having a data center is such an advantage to your community that people are gonna say, that's false news. Here's the facts.
The problem though is that in the US way of doing things, the decision of whether to site a data center or not ends up being a local decision, not a national decision. Whereas in China, China can just declare, okay, the East is going to be responsible for data, the West is going to be responsible for compute and energy, and we're going to build this national-scale grid for combining compute data and energy together. And poof, you're the CCP and you get to centrally command the whole economy. In the US, we have a different system where individual local municipalities and states get to say what they do and do not want their land used for. And we end up in this system that's far easier if you're a foreign adversary, worst-case scenario, to polarize and to shut data centers out of terrestrial deployment.
But this is false data. There's— this is an outrage cycle in social media.
Shocked that foreign interference would leverage false data. Shocked.
