RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesEverywhere you look, people are talking about artificial intelligence (AI). It’s on your TV. It’s on your radio. It’s on your social media feed. And it seems like Democrats and their media allies are doing their very best to scare you away from it by telling you that AI is going to destroy the environment, take your job and hike up your utility bills. But anytime Democrats and liberal journalists are in lockstep on an issue, that should set off your alarm bells – why do they want you to be scared?
The reason is that left-wingers want to seize control of AI for their own political purposes. But don’t take my word for it. As Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson put it: "the fight for Democrats is not ‘we are for AI’ or ‘we are against AI.’ That framing is a trap. The fight is over control."
Democrats and their media allies want to scare people about AI in order to justify putting woke bureaucrats in charge, where they can force AI to advance their political agenda. Remember how Big Tech companies became Democrats’ political censors under Joe Biden? That’s what Democrats want to do with AI – turn it into a political weapon.
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But to do that, they first need to scare you enough that you decide you’re OK with the government seizing control over AI. So, of course, they’re not telling you the other side of the story. Here’s that side.
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AI and data centers are revitalizing the pro-Trump small towns that make up the heartbeat of America – the exact small towns that were left for dead when offshoring hollowed out the American manufacturing industry.
Take Ellendale, N.D., for example. Decades of economic decline left the town with barely 1,000 residents as of the most recent census. As the school superintendent put it: "We were a dying little town." But then a data center arrived – and everything changed.
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Jobs went through the roof. Tax revenue did, too, as one columnist recounted: "Ellendale can now afford to repave its streets, renovate its senior center, finance a new public-safety complex, establish walking trails and refurbish its historic opera house."
That’s not a one-off story. In Louisiana’s Richland Parish – a community that voted for President Donald Trump by a nearly 40% margin in 2024 – a Meta data center brought in so much tax revenue that local teachers received bonuses of $50,000.
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Or consider rural Virginia’s Louisa County, where data center development didn’t just bring jobs – it brought tax cuts, too, thanks to the surge in tax revenue from the data centers. And then there’s the little red town of Quincy, Wash., where an investment surge from data centers hads brought a new $120 million high school, a 79% decrease in the poverty rate, new sidewalks, more police officers on the beat, property tax cuts, and more.
In short: the total revival of the town. So, it’s no surprise that Wells Fargo analyst Ohsung Kwon’s research concluded that communities with data centers are seeing "significant economic benefits" – both during data center construction and for years afterwards.
Nobody is telling you the truth about water, utility bills and what data centers have to do with them. Not the electric companies, not the liberal media and certainly not elected Democrats like New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .
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The power companies were quick to scapegoat data centers for cost increases that began well before the very first version of ChatGPT was released on Nov. 30, 2022. But in case there was any doubt, President Donald Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Plan guarantees that AI companies pay their own way, ensuring that Americans are protected from rate increases due to data center developments. More than 80% – and counting – of Americans are covered under the Ratepayer Protection Plan.
In some cases, data center developments can actually lead to lower bills for neighboring residents. A June 2026 study found that data center developments indeed led to modest decreases in electricity rates. That might seem counterintuitive at first, but the reality is that electric companies have huge fixed costs – costs that they have to pay whether they have one customer or one million – in which case having a massive customer (data centers) absorb the lion’s share of those fixed costs means fewer costs to spread among everyone else.
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Reality bears this out as well. In Ellendale, N.D., electricity bills were $250 lower per customer thanks to their new data center. Who wouldn’t want an annual $250 discount on their electric bill?
The narrative about water use might be the most misleading one of all. It’s largely due to a bestselling book – "Empire of AI" – that was so factually flawed that it suffered multiple corrections. Even the Washington Post observed that Empire of AI’s calculations were off by a "thousandfold."
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And not only was the book wrong, but it quickly became outdated, too, because data centers are moving to closed-loop cooling systems in which "day-to-day cooling doesn’t depend on adding water" and "community water usage for cooling the data center is effectively zero." Or, as Nvidia’s chief sustainability officer put it: "The water consumption challenge for data centers is largely solved."
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