AOC’s ‘dirty water’ trick feeds the left’s delusional data-center panic

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stole the show at a recent congressional hearing with two jars of brown water. 

She explained that the dirty water had come from Morgan County, Ga., where a Meta data center is allegedly tainting the water of local residents. 

It was an image perfectly suited to driving the intensifying opposition to data centers in that it was photogenic, easy to understand — and misleading. 

According to reporting in The New York Times last year, the water problem has affected four homes in the vicinity of the data center, not the entire county, as AOC implied.

It stands to reason that the construction of the data center disturbed the private wells of these homes (the problems started when Meta broke ground), but that could happen with any construction project. 

As a gesture of goodwill, Meta should replace the wells.

But the PR damage has already been done. 

The growing animus to data centers is as irrational as the campaign to stop nuclear power, which had considerable success, to our detriment, to this day. 

At least nuclear power has had real accidents, although the one in the United States, Three Mile Island, was ultimately of trifling significance.

There has been no data-center equivalent of Chernobyl or Fukushima, and there never will be. 

The opposition to data centers is what you might call a moral panic, except there is nothing moral about potentially sabotaging the United States in the AI race with China based on misunderstandings and lies. 

Data centers have been with us for a long time, powering the internet and cloud computing.

They’ve kicked into overdrive, though, with the rise of artificial intelligence, which depends on large-scale computing power.

The centers don’t need many people to operate them, but they create lots of construction jobs and contribute massive tax revenue to the places where they are located. 

What’s not to like?

Well, they require lots of energy and water, and this is presumed to strain local communities and drive up rates for everyone else. 

The evidence doesn’t show much effect on the price of electricity, though.

Rates are high in states with misbegotten policies that make electricity more expensive, while rates are lower and increasing more slowly in the states that have the most data centers.

That’s because a state like Texas, with a large concentration of data centers, has a policy of energy abundance that easily absorbs more demand. 

The water concern, too, is overblown: All sorts of other activities use much more water.

The Substacker Andy Masley points out that if the amount of water used by data centers triples by 2030, they still would require only 8% of water it takes to maintain the nation’s golf courses. 

According to scare-mongering headlines, AI data centers are practically sucking Texas dry.

Yet Masley notes that they have added an infinitesimal 0.005% to the Lone Star State’s water demands. 

Then, there’s the complaint that data centers are unsightly.

People post beautiful natural vistas on social media, commenting that data centers don’t belong there.

This makes it seem as if data centers are going to be located in the middle of, say, Zion National Park, rather than on sites that would otherwise host warehouses or other industrial-type projects.

You know what else doesn’t look great?

Factories.

But we’d never say we don’t want manufacturing in the United States due to poor aesthetics. 

The data-center boom, by the way, is creating soaring demand for blue-collar workers.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, electricians and the like are often earning roughly 25% more working on data centers than in their former jobs. 

One hopes that the campaign against data centers won’t be as successful as the anti-nuclear movement was, but instead fizzles like the anti-fracking crusade.

The United States wouldn’t be the world’s largest exporter of natural gas today if it had listened to the hysterics who opposed fracking — and it should similarly disregard the purveyors of data-center panic. 

X: @RichLowry