The AI Buildout Is Fracturing Its Own Coalition

The movement that helped put Donald Trump back in the White House is now warning him that his own energy policy will poison the people who voted for him. Make America Healthy Again leaders sent the president a letter this week naming mercury, soot, and coal ash as the public health risks of running AI data centers on coal — the very fuel his administration has spent the past year forcing back into service ^[1][2]. The letter proposes geothermal, solar with storage, and efficiency instead, alternatives that collide head-on with the April 2025 executive order designating coal as critical for data center power ^[1]. That collision is not a stray objection. It is one of four fractures now running through the same coalition that is demanding the AI buildout move faster, each following a different federal override aimed at clearing obstacles to the buildout. Force coal to power AI, and the health faction revolts. Federal overrides of local zoning have coincided with a wave of moratoriums — Indianapolis has frozen new projects through 2027, and at least eight other jurisdictions have passed pauses, while opposition has now blocked nearly $100 billion in proposed projects across the US and Canada ^[3][4]. Borrow to fund the buildout, and the money collides with the government's own borrowing. That last one is the least visible and maybe the most consequential. The same bond market that finances the federal government now also finances the data centers. AI-related borrowing is already more than 40% of new long-term investment-grade corporate debt, and Goldman Sachs projects debt will fund over a third of all AI spending by 2027 ^[5][6]. That corporate demand is competing with a $40 trillion national debt for the same capital pools, and the 30-year Treasury yield has climbed to 5.28%, its highest since 2007 ^[7][6]. Analysts describe a new era of crowding out, with government debt issuance and AI capital spending competing for the same global capital pools ^[8]. Meanwhile electricity prices rose 6.9% in 2025, more than double inflation, as the buildout's power demand climbed, and PJM capacity prices jumped more than tenfold ^[9]. The same rising costs that accompany the buildout are the grievance the moratoriums answer. Then there is the argument meant to dissolve all of it: China. Federal regulators ordered grid operators to accelerate connections for large power users, explicitly framed as keeping the US competitive lead over China in AI computing ^[10]. But the argument has kept escalating. House Energy and Commerce Republicans are now urging the administration to investigate whether China is funding domestic opposition to data centers, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has gone further.

Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’ — Donald Trump

The coalition demanding speed is now suggesting its own base's objections are enemy action. The buildout is not stopping. It is deforming. It routes toward the places that welcome it — St. Louis has secured $25 billion from Google and Amazon ^[11] — toward nascent nuclear from NuScale and Oklo ^[12], and toward off-grid gas like Musk's Colossus plant in Mississippi ^[10]. The contested routes close not because the technology fails but because the political coalition can't hold them open. What gets built, and where, is being decided less by engineering than by the limits of the coalition demanding it.