While politicians brand every objection as disloyalty, the state is quietly handing over public land, drought-stricken aquifers, and strained power grids to Big Tech — and telling Americans to be grateful for the privilege.
America is in an AI arms race. That’s the official story, anyway — a convenient narrative blasted from the teleprompters of corporate media and the podiums of bought-off politicians. We’re told that to question the wholesale surrender of our power grids, our water aquifers, and now our public lands to the data center boom is not just naive, but unpatriotic. This is the oldest trick in the book of statecraft: wrap a corporate giveaway in the flag and dare anyone to question it. The moment dissent gets reframed as disloyalty, you know you’re being scammed.
This was the raw, unfiltered message from Donald Trump at his Ratepayer Protection Pledge event, where he looked at his own constituents and told them, regarding the industrialization of their communities, “You can’t fight it. You have to go with it.” There is no clearer definition of tyranny than that. It’s the voice of an apparatus that has stopped asking for consent and started issuing commands.
Before we go further, let’s be crystal clear about what a free market actually is, and how it relates to the building of these data centers, because the term has been so grotesquely twisted it’s nearly lost its meaning. A free market is what happens when private individuals or companies make consensual deals. It is the opposite of the centrally planned, state-subsidized, resource-commandeering binge we are currently watching unfold.
And the most damning evidence that this AI boom has nothing to do with free enterprise is the simple fact that they are building it on your land. This isn’t private companies buying private property from willing sellers. This is the state acting as a real estate agent for the corporate elite, handing over vast tracts of public and military land in negotiated deals that the communities sitting next to them never got a real vote on.
Consider the facts. In Nevada, the federal Bureau of Land Management just approved the first commercial AI data center ever authorized on public land, waving aside desert tortoise habitat and the already-drought-stricken Colorado River. The agency did it, according to the conservation groups now suing to stop it, by reusing an old environmental review written for an entirely different solar project — meaning no new review and no public comment period were ever required, and the city of Boulder City itself says it was never consulted. The Department of Energy is running the same play with the wreckage of the Cold War: it has tapped SoftBank to build a 10-gigawatt AI campus at the former Portsmouth uranium enrichment plant in Ohio, selected Brookfield and NextEra for a $100 billion complex at the former Paducah uranium plant in Kentucky, and picked Amentum and DC Blox to develop a gigawatt-scale campus at the Savannah River nuclear-weapons site in South Carolina.
The Department of Defense has gotten in on it too, conditionally selecting Carlyle and CyrusOne to build hyperscale data centers on Army land at Fort Bliss, Texas, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, while the Air Force has offered up nearly 4,700 acres across three bases in Alaska for the same purpose. It has even trickled down to city hall: back in 2023, the Manassas, Virginia city council voted unanimously to sell 21 acres of city-owned airport land directly to Amazon for a new data center, with no ballot, no referendum, and barely a public hearing.
When the state is auctioning off the very land it supposedly holds in trust for the public, this is not capitalism. This is corporatism. It is a direct transfer of public assets into private, politically connected hands, and it makes a complete mockery of any claim to a “free market.”
With every one of these backroom deals comes the same tired promise: jobs. But the state’s own numbers expose the fraud. At a cost of roughly $13 million in investment per permanent job in Virginia, or $11 million per job in a recent New York deal, these are not job-creation programs. They are handouts to automate human labor. You’re being asked to celebrate a system where your own tax dollars subsidize the very automation that renders you obsolete.
The real costs — the ones that never make it onto the glossy brochures — are being socialized and dumped on an unwilling public. Residential electricity prices have shot up more than 36 percent since 2020, with data centers a primary driver. Dominion Energy in Virginia pushed through its first base-rate hike since 1992, and Baltimore residents saw their bills climb by more than $17 a month after a record power auction. The grid is being strained toward the breaking point, and the cost of every upgrade flows directly to ratepayers who never consented to any of it. It’s a textbook case of privatized profit and socialized loss: politically connected corporations reap the rewards, and you get handed the bill.
These facilities are also vampires, and they are draining the aquifers dry. U.S. data centers consumed more than 200 billion gallons of water last year, with roughly 93 percent of that footprint hidden inside off-site power plants where nobody’s looking. In drought-stricken Texas, consumption is projected to explode 714 percent by 2030, yet a state legislative hearing revealed that a staggering 83 percent of the state’s data centers simply refused to comply with mandatory water reporting. This stops being a negotiation and becomes the outright seizure of a shared public resource, with the state acting as armed lookout for the plunder.
It becomes something far more sinister when you remember what a lot of this infrastructure is actually for. Data centers themselves are neutral, but their deployment by the state is not. When the Department of Defense leases military land to build data centers, it isn’t for hosting cat videos. It is the physical construction of a turnkey surveillance apparatus, built on the one category of American ground that is already unambiguously controlled by the government, with none of the normal local checks that even a private developer would face. We are being told to subsidize the very infrastructure that is increasingly being used to watch our every move — and to do it on land we collectively own.
The “China” threat is the ultimate rhetorical get-out-of-jail-free card, a device deployed to short-circuit exactly this kind of thinking. The moment a local community questions a backroom land deal, they get branded as puppets of Beijing. When Senator John Fetterman attacked a proposed data center moratorium, he didn’t debate the substance — he simply branded it “China First,” as if pausing to ask a question were itself the crime. It’s a cynical, effective move: it forces citizens to defend their own patriotism instead of questioning the seizure of their resources.
But if we are socializing the costs, commandeering public-owned and military land, and ramming through approvals via executive order while cutting communities out of the process entirely, we are already mimicking the very model we claim to be racing against. If we build a digital panopticon on public land in order to out-compete an authoritarian surveillance state, have we defeated authoritarianism — or just become it?
To be entirely clear here, private companies should be free to make consensual agreements with willing property owners — to purchase land, to lease land, to build whatever product they want on it. That is not corporatism, and it is not cronyism. That is the actual American dream: two parties agreeing to a transaction because each believes they’ll be better off for it, with no gun pointed at either side. When politicians on the left reach instinctively for government force — bans, moratoriums, heavy-handed mandates — to stop that kind of voluntary exchange simply because they dislike the outcome, that impulse deserves the same scrutiny we give every other expansion of state power.
But voluntary exchange has a boundary, and it isn’t a partisan one: the right to build ends where it starts imposing real costs on someone who never agreed to the deal. A data center is a legitimate business until its water draw dries up a neighbor’s well, until its power demand spikes a stranger’s electric bill, or until the servers inside it get quietly repurposed to help build a digital panopticon that watches Americans around the clock. At that point, we’re no longer talking about free enterprise. We’re talking about externalized harm — and, in the surveillance case, a direct assault on the very liberty that makes free enterprise worth defending in the first place. This isn’t a left-versus-right fight, and treating it like one is exactly how both sides get played. It’s a question that logic and a basic understanding of property rights can settle without anyone needing to pick a team.
And no, this is not an argument against the technology. It’s a demand for an end to the looting. A genuine free market has rules that protect against coercion and externalized costs. What we have instead is a system of state-enforced plunder wearing a free-market costume. Restoring sanity doesn’t mean begging for scraps at the table. At a bare minimum, it means demanding:
• An outright prohibition on data center construction on public and military land.
• Mandatory, transparent reporting of water and energy consumption before any permit is even considered, not after.
• An end to public subsidies for this industry entirely. Let these companies pay their own way.
The question is not whether we will build the future, but whether it will be built on our land, with our resources, and without our consent, solely for the benefit of a handful of state-connected corporations. You do not beat an authoritarian surveillance state by building one on your own soil. Do that, and China hasn’t lost. We have.
Article posted with permission from Matt Agorist
