The Data Center Fight Is More Complicated Than the Headlines
On Fox Business in May 2026, Kevin O'Leary suggested that two women from Utah might be working for the Chinese government. Their offense was organizing local opposition to his $100 billion Stratos data center in Hansel Valley. The project would cover 40,000 acres, more than twice Manhattan's footprint, and draw 9 gigawatts, more than the entire state uses in a year.
He called them "proxies for the Chinese government" and taunted, "come out, come out wherever you are." The reasoning, as Fortune reported it: anyone slowing American compute must be working for the only adversary who would benefit.
Rather than hide, Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan laughed, mocked his flip-flops-with-a-suit look, and let the internet make him the punchline. Within days the CEO of O'Leary's own firm, Paul Palandjian, walked back the accusation, telling Business Insider the company accepted that the women were American political strategists.
The insult collapsed under its own weight. What I keep returning to is the gap behind it: the distance between a hot-mic accusation and the careful clarification the same firm issued days later. The pushback he tried to paint as foreign was not even partisan. Utah's own Republican governor, Spencer Cox, had already pressed the project for a water plan to protect the Great Salt Lake. When the loudest voice reaches for a spy story, something in the conversation has already gone wrong.
The Concerns Are Real, and So Is the Upside
Water is where the worry usually starts, and the numbers explain why. Some hyperscale facilities draw up to 5 million gallons a day, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute reports. The power grid is straining under the same demand. In the PJM region, the grid serving 65 million people across 13 states, supply costs jumped from $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion in a single year, and Brookings attributes close to two-thirds of that climb to data centers. Those costs land on the monthly bill. In Utah, residential electricity rates rose 15.2 percent in twelve months, the third-largest jump in the country, according to the Energy Information Administration.
And this is not a fringe reaction. Gallup found that 7 in 10 Americans do not want an AI facility built in their own community. The opposition O'Leary tried to cast as foreign is, in fact, most of America.
For all that, the same buildout could underwrite the breakthroughs we have been waiting on for a generation. That possibility is the part the headlines rarely hold long enough to examine.
What If We Measured Both Sides?
This debate runs on a lopsided ledger. The costs are concrete and immediate. Gallons, megawatts, acres, the tax revenue a town gives up, all of it landing on a meter or a balance sheet. The benefits are harder to pin down, because most have not arrived yet, and a benefit that has not arrived is easy to value at nothing. So we tally the cost in full and the upside at zero. What would it look like to weigh both columns, even when one of them is still a guess?
In May 2026, the upside stopped being hypothetical. In 1946, Paul Erdős posed a deceptively simple question. Scatter points on a flat plane, and how many pairs can sit exactly one unit apart? For decades, the square grid seemed to be the best anyone could do. Then a researcher fed the problem to an OpenAI reasoning model, a general-purpose system rather than one built for mathematics, and it found a better arrangement by importing tools from algebraic number theory that no one had thought to connect to the geometry. As Scientific American described it, "After 80 years of fruitless struggle by human mathematicians, a major geometry conjecture has at last been solved." Experts told OpenAI the proof would have earned a spot in a leading journal even if a human had written it. The thing that solved it was a chatbot.
Read that and it is tempting to think the machines had finally outsmarted us, on an ordinary Tuesday. So I went looking for the asterisk, and the people closest to the work supplied it. Human mathematicians had to clean up the model's output before the proof held. The model had proved a better arrangement existed without working out how much better, and a Princeton mathematician, Will Sawin, pinned that down. Sébastien Bubeck, who leads OpenAI's mathematical work, put it plainly. The model "did not invent something fundamentally new that nobody saw coming. It just executed like an amazing mathematician."
None of this proves AI will solve everything. What it proves is smaller and more interesting. This infrastructure, paired with serious people, can reach places neither would reach alone. What else might sit behind that door? Drug discovery, climate modeling, materials we cannot make yet. The honest answer is we do not know, and sitting with that uncertainty beats pretending we already know which way it breaks.
The Better Case No One Is Making
The companies building these data centers keep losing the argument for them. I wrote in February about the labs fumbling their message at the Super Bowl, and the same instinct is now playing out on concrete and steel rather than ad buys. Lost in the noise is the better case, the one about jobs, tax revenue, and the kind of infrastructure a town keeps long after the trucks leave. The bar is on the floor. Showing a community what it stands to gain, and giving it a real stake in the outcome, would do more than any press release.
Two thousand miles east of Hansel Valley, one town has been quietly making exactly that case. The Town of Jay sits in Franklin County, Maine. For generations the Androscoggin Mill carried the local economy, until a 2020 boiler explosion began its decline and Pixelle Specialty Solutions left in 2023, taking the rest of the jobs and 22 percent of the town's tax base with it. Earlier attempts to revive the site went nowhere. So the town spent two years working to put a data center where the mill once stood.
That patience is starting to pay off. According to Governor Mills' April 24 veto message, the $550 million project would bring more than 800 construction jobs, at least 100 high-paying permanent positions, and substantial property tax revenue. What sets it apart is how it would be built. Rather than break new ground, the developers plan to reuse the mill's existing buildings, water, and electrical infrastructure, which, as Mills noted, would avoid the very impacts on the environment and on ratepayers that drive the opposition elsewhere. The project is already under contract, has cleared several permits, and carries the backing of the town and the wider region.
What makes Jay matter is the governance. Mills did three things at once. She vetoed the statewide moratorium that would have killed the project, signed a separate bill stripping data centers of state tax breaks, and created a council to recommend rules for the rest. Her reasoning held both truths. A moratorium, she wrote, can be "appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states," but a blanket ban would have killed a project her own community wanted.
I do not want to oversell this. One hundred permanent jobs is fewer than the mill once supported, and critics have said so fairly. But the lesson was never in the job count. It is in the process. Two years of local work, infrastructure reused instead of land broken, governance written in rather than bolted on after a fight. That is the rare outline people on different sides could actually sign.
Bigger Than One Town
Jay is one town. The same fight is unfolding in statehouses across the country. MultiState counted over 300 data center bills in the first six weeks of 2026, spread across more than 30 states, with outright moratoriums proposed in 11. So far not one has cleared its originating chamber. The country is deciding how to build this one legislature at a time.
When this reaches a ballot, the question is rarely AI or no AI, but how to build it. A community can push for governance written into the buildout, keeping some leverage over water and power, or back a moratorium that freezes everything while federal rules take years to arrive. By the time Washington acts, the window may have closed.
And the stakes reach well past any single town. The United States and China are effectively the only two countries building AI infrastructure at full scale, and none of us can read China's actual hand. We are being asked to weigh in on something with national consequences while missing half the picture. In November, some of this lands on ballots as local and statewide measures, and the rest rides on the lawmakers voters send to write the rules.
Most of us will never have a data center proposed in our own town. But the story will keep finding us anyway, in the news, on a ballot, or in what the people we elect decide to do about it. The work is not to pick a side from the headlines, but to understand it well enough to see what they leave out. Some of these buildouts will be great for local communities. Some will not be. There are no absolutes when we are all living through a transformative time in human history. No headline will sort that out for us, and the loudest voices only make it harder to see. That leaves the work to us. Information is power, especially in conversations this ambiguous. The clearer we see it, the better the choices we make, in November and long after.