The AI Buildout Has Stopped Arguing With the Towns

A Republican congressman floated the idea last week that the people fighting data centers in their towns might not be acting on their own.

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

Mark McCormick offered no evidence for the claim, and none has surfaced. But the speculation itself is the point. It sits alongside an industry rebrand that moves in the same direction: reframing local opposition as something other than a legitimate land-use grievance. Jensen Huang has stopped calling the new facilities data centers at all. In South Korea, where he sealed deals for gigawatt-scale plants, he described them in the language of industrial policy rather than zoning ^[1].

Together, we will codevelop the next generation of memory for AI factories and support the accelerating global expansion of AI infrastructure - from frontier model training to agentic and physical AI. — Nvidia

A factory is not something a town weighs in on; it is something a nation needs to win. The rebrand does the same work as McCormick's speculation, without the accusation: it moves the objection out of "what should happen on this land" and into "what stands in the way of national competitiveness." The same reframing shows up in how the industry talks about building abroad. OpenAI is scouting a one-gigawatt data center in India, and it describes its global expansion through a program that coordinates with the U.S. government ^[2].

We (OpenAI) are opening our first office in India later this year! and I’m looking forward to visiting next month. — Sam Altman

Meanwhile, at home, local democratic consent is being removed from the process by mechanism. The Army and Air Force are leasing military land for data centers — Carlyle at Fort Bliss, CyrusOne at Dugway Proving Ground — where no zoning board has jurisdiction ^[3]. The EPA has ruled that power plants serving only data centers, disconnected from the public grid, are exempt from the Clean Air Act's acid-rain program ^[4]. Federal regulators have ordered grid operators to speed up connections for large power users, explicitly framed as competing with China ^[5]. None of this is one coordinated push — the offshore buildout is partly plain economics, with construction costs in India running far below developed markets ^[6]. But the direction of travel is the same: the places where people can say no are getting smaller. And that is where the collision begins. The politicians who once championed the buildout are now running against it. In Ohio, Jon Husted pushed through statewide tax breaks for data centers; now, running for Senate, he says the industry has brought the backlash on itself ^[7].

I’ve made clear from the beginning that Jon Husted is the point man for these 230 or 240 new data centers in Ohio. — Sherrod Brown

In Michigan, Republican congressman Tom Barrett is campaigning on the same line — that the decision belongs to the people who live there ^[8].

If I were governor, I would want data centers so badly. — Donald Trump

The president is on the other side of his own party. Asked about communities that refuse data centers, Donald Trump made clear he would welcome them ^[8].

The people in the communities have to decide that for themselves. — Tom Barrett

This is not a forecast. It is the present shape of the fight. The federal executive is systematically removing local say from the siting process — military land, environmental exemptions, grid preemption — while state-level candidates, including Republicans who built the tax breaks in the first place, are running to restore it. The same party, two directions, live and unresolved.