The Four Workarounds That Can't Rezone Physics

A single large data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day — the volume a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people needs ^[1]. That number does not change when you reclassify the building as critical infrastructure, or site it on a military base, or let it generate its own power. It is a fact of physics, not of law. And over the past sixteen months, the federal government has tried all three — plus a fourth — with a consistency that suggests the problem is not being misunderstood so much as being solved at the wrong level. The cleanest illustration arrived in March, when the Army selected Carlyle to build a commercial AI data center on 1,384 acres at Fort Bliss, Texas, using an Enhanced Use Lease financed entirely with private capital ^[2]. No civilian zoning board was involved. No municipal ordinance applied. The project sat on federal land, under federal authority, and the local mayor's first public concern was not about jurisdiction.

We have to protect our natural resources, especially our water, and make sure any project is done responsibly. — Renard Johnson

Representative Veronica Escobar revealed the deal "began as a directive from the Trump Administration and did not include Congressional or community consultation" ^[2]. The legal bypass was complete. The water question remained. In April, the administration tried a broader approach: an executive order designating data centers as "critical national security infrastructure" ^[3]. The president declared the stakes plainly.

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

But a national-security label does not produce a single gallon of water or a single megawatt of power. It is a reclassification of the building, not of the aquifer beneath it. The same communities that had been imposing moratoriums — over 100 proposed or enacted across the country, cutting across red, blue, and purple states ^[4] — now found their local concerns wearing a federal override, and the concerns did not disappear. The on-site power workaround produced an even sharper collision. Rather than wait years in grid interconnection queues, developers began deploying their own generation: Oracle used behind-the-meter natural gas for Stargate campuses, and xAI deployed temporary gas turbines for its Colossus facility ^[5]. In Hilliard, Ohio, Amazon proposed 158 emergency diesel generators at a data center near homes, parks, and Beacon Elementary School ^[6]. The Ohio EPA held a public hearing. The Sierra Club's Pennsylvania chapter director did not mince words.

They’re even worse than coal. — Tom Schuster

The legal workaround — generate your own power, skip the grid queue — had relocated the conflict from the utility commission to the school pickup line. This summer, the Department of Energy granted emergency authorization to PJM Interconnection to require data centers to switch to backup diesel generators during a heat wave to prevent residential blackouts ^[7], deepening the same dynamic: federal intervention shifting industrial pollution onto host communities. The fourth workaround is procedural. In May, the EPA proposed a "pre-permit construction rule" allowing data centers to begin building non-emitting components — piping, wiring, cement pads, site clearing — before receiving federal air emission permits ^[8]. The logic is straightforward: start the physical work while the paperwork catches up. Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center saw a different logic.

Today’s proposal works to provide solutions to issues that have held up critical American infrastructure and advance the next great technological forefront. — Lee Zeldin

The pattern across all four is the same: a legal barrier is identified and routed around, and the underlying physical or political constraint re-emerges in a new form. Water at Fort Bliss. Diesel exhaust in Hilliard. Sunk costs in the permitting process. The ingenuity is real; the problem it is solving is not. Two countercurrents are now running against this federal acceleration. The first comes from within the government itself: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act to pause new construction ^[9]. Ocasio-Cortez framed the issue in terms the executive branch has not engaged.

These data centers power thousands of high intensity computer chips that are processing at all times and require massive amounts of energy to operate. — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The second countercurrent is the one approach that addresses the physical constraint directly. Google and Georgia Power are building a 1,500-megawatt gas plant and 500 megawatts of battery storage, backed by $26.5 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees ^[10]. The model is straightforward: new generation, paid for by the companies that will use it, with contracts that protect residential ratepayers. In Oklahoma, Google agreed with OG&E to cover 100 percent of grid connection costs for three data centers, with minimum billing and exit penalties to shield residential customers ^[10]. These are not workarounds — they are infrastructure, built on the recognition that you cannot reclassify your way out of a power deficit. But the Georgia plant will not come online until 2028 or 2029. The administration's June 2026 national security presidential memorandum declared it would "secure a decisive and enduring AI advantage against any and all adversaries" ^[11].

My Administration will ensure that those who safeguard America and the American way of life are equipped with the most sophisticated and secure AI technologies to perform complex, time-sensitive, and highly-consequential missions, with full confidence that those tools will be available when they matter most … Through these efforts, my Administration will secure a decisive and enduring AI advantage against any and all adversaries while safeguarding the constitutional chain of command. — Donald Trump

A timeline measured in years does not match a demand stated in the present tense. And even when the physical constraints are solved, the political one remains. In Killeen, Texas — adjacent to Fort Hood, where the Defense Department is seeking private developers for AI data centers on military land ^[12] — the Planning and Zoning Commission rejected a $30 million data center after developers pitched closed-loop coolant to avoid municipal water use entirely ^[13]. The water problem was solved. The consent problem was not.

I’ve not seen a single citizen say that it was beneficial to their community. That’s why I’m asking you, where can I find if you’re saying that this is beneficial to us? — Scedric Moss

The binding constraint is not legal authority. It is not even physics alone. It is the fact that someone has to live next to it, and no executive order can make them want to.