The Government Found a Place to Build Data Centers Where No One Can Say No

Rep. Mark McCormick, a Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said the quiet part out loud this week. His proposal to put AI data centers on three Georgia military bases — Fort Gordon, Fort Benning, Fort Hunter — was pitched in plain terms: build on bases to avoid the fights that civilian projects keep losing ^[1].

If we don't get this right, we will fall behind. — Mark McCormick

That sentence is the moment a strategy became legible. It did not start with McCormick. Thirteen months ago, in July 2025, the president signed an executive order designating data centers as critical national security infrastructure ^[2]. The legal effect was to move these buildings out of the category of commercial development and into the category of defense asset — which is what makes a military base a plausible address for one.

America is the country that started the AI race and as President of the U.S. I'm here today to declare that America is going to win it. — Donald Trump

From there the steps came in sequence, each one adding a piece. In November 2025 the Department of Energy picked four federal sites — Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Savannah River, and the Paducah plant in Kentucky — and offered developers the land "as is, where is," up to 44,000 acres at Idaho alone ^[3]. In May the Defense Department solicited private developers — OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, SpaceX among them — for unused base land, starting with 207 acres at Fort Hood ^[4]. This month the Army signed Enhanced Use Lease deals with Carlyle at Fort Bliss and CyrusOne at Dugway Proving Ground, trading land for compute ^[5]. None of this required a zoning board. That is the point. The civilian route is clogged: Cullman, Alabama is weighing a permanent ban, Kalamazoo a moratorium, Tulare County a 45-day freeze, Lowndes County a six-month pause ^[6]. Ohioans are pushing a constitutional amendment to ban large data centers outright ^[7]. In Cedar Rapids, a resident named Kathy Geronzin stood up and listed what the projects actually mean on the ground — water, electricity, noise, light, lost farmland, tax burden, traffic ^[8]. The parallel track exists so that none of those people get a vote. The environmental review went the same way. In July the EPA ruled that power plants serving only a data center, with no connection to the public grid, are exempt from the Clean Air Act's acid rain rules ^[9]. Military-base data centers are required to be independently powered and off-grid — so the exemption and the siting strategy fit together like two halves of one mechanism. Then came the second job the label does. McCormick didn't stop at bypassing opposition; he speculated that the protests themselves might be funded by China or other competitors trying to slow American progress ^[1].

I think that China or somebody who doesn't want us to compete with them is funding it because this is something we do need as Americans. — Mark McCormick

This is the move that turns a zoning dispute into a security matter. The FCC has already barred Chinese telecom firms from running data centers here on national-security grounds ^[10], and Rep. Cory Mills pushed through an amendment banning components from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea in military-base facilities ^[5]. The framework is real and it is useful — and it now reaches the people who object. A citizen with a grievance about water becomes, in this telling, a possible agent of a foreign power. The developers themselves have noticed how portable the label is. Novva and Thunderhead sought presidential exemptions from pollution rules by citing "national security" and "AI supremacy" ^[11]. Novva's CEO, Wes Swenson, was candid about how broadly the claim can be stretched.

To fast track it, they created that exemption, — Wes Swenson

The bypass is not complete, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. The Paducah project, for all its federal land, still needs approval from Kentucky's utility regulator ^[12]. The military-base projects have genuine defense applications — drone swarms, hypersonic defense, AI cybersecurity — not just a zoning workaround ^[4]. And even the loudest congressional skeptic, Rep. John Garamendi, framed his objection as a request for environmental and security review, not a challenge to the idea itself.

We just want to make sure that if we're going to put a data center on a federal facility, that federal facility is not going to be degraded by the data center. — John Garamendi

That last detail is the one that should linger. The most forceful pushback available accepts the premise that data centers belong on military bases and argues only about how carefully they get built there. The question of whether a community gets to say no is not being reopened. It is being retired — not by winning the argument at the zoning board, but by moving the building to a place where the board never meets, and by describing the people who used to show up as something other than citizens.