Build the Damn Data Centers. China Isn't Waiting.

Full episode transcript

Build the damn data centers. I am tired of watching this country demand the future and then panic every time somebody tries to build the machinery that makes the future possible. AI needs compute. Compute needs buildings, chips, power, cooling, and people who know how to run it. That is not a scandal. That is infrastructure. China understands that. They are building. We are holding another meeting about whether progress feels scary. My position is simple: build them, build them fast, and stop acting like opting out is a serious strategy. People do this at every technological revolution. The new machine shows up, the old way of working gets threatened, and somebody declares that this time progress is going to destroy the economy. Some jobs do disappear. Some companies fail. People have to learn new things. That is disruption, and disruption is not pleasant for everybody. But the answer has never been to freeze the economy at the old job titles. The places that build, adapt, and reorganize capture the new productivity. The places that refuse get to buy the future from somebody else. The historical pattern is not that technology leaves every job untouched. Of course it does not. It destroys tasks, creates tasks, changes industries, and forces people and companies to move. American labor research shows that new work keeps appearing as technology changes what the economy can do. That is the part the doom story always leaves out. If your standard for progress is that nobody can ever be disrupted, then you have outlawed progress. I do not accept that standard, and neither should a country that expects to lead. Now look at China. China's own government says its intelligent computing capacity reached two thousand one hundred eighty-five EFLOPS at the end of June, up one hundred seventy-seven percent in a year. You do not have to admire their system to understand what that number means. They are treating compute capacity like strategic infrastructure. They are coordinating data centers with power, networks, and industrial policy. They are not asking whether the AI era should have buildings. They are deciding how many they can get online. That is the competition. China builds generation, transmission, compute clusters, and the connections between them. America has the capital, the companies, the talent, and the demand — and then lets every local panic turn into a national strategy. We cannot regulate ourselves into technological leadership. We cannot litigate our way into more compute. And we definitely cannot win by telling the companies building the future to put the machines somewhere else. Somebody will build this capacity. The only question is whether we intend to own enough of it. And yes, I think most of the anti-data-center panic people are swallowing is propaganda, recycled propaganda, or people doing the propagandist's job for free. We now have a documented example. OpenAI caught a PRC-origin operation posing as Americans and pushing claims that AI data centers were raising ordinary families' electricity prices. OpenAI called it Data Center Bandwagon. At the same time, China is expanding its own compute and power infrastructure. My conclusion is simple: anyone helping slow America's buildout is helping China, deliberately or not. The message works because it borrows real concerns and turns every one of them into a veto. Electricity prices. Water. Jobs. Land. Noise. There is always a reason the next piece of infrastructure must be built anywhere except here. Of course building something has an impact. That is what building means. The grown-up response is to engineer the impact, contract around it, and make the operator carry the cost it creates. The unserious response is to pretend that a country can have unlimited digital capability with no power plants, no wires, no cooling, and no buildings. Take water. People say data centers use a bunch of water as if every facility has the same design forever. It is nonsense. Microsoft has already designed a new generation of data centers that consumes zero water for cooling by circulating water in a closed loop. That does not make water irrelevant. It proves the footprint is an engineering decision, not a law of nature. Site the project correctly. Use the right cooling system. Reuse water where it makes sense. Then build it. A solvable engineering problem is not a moral argument against progress. This is not complicated. If a data center needs power, build or contract the power. If it needs grid upgrades, put the cost where it belongs. If the local water system cannot support one design, use a different design or choose a different site. Measure what the facility actually uses. Enforce the agreement. Then move. Those are construction and operating decisions. They are not a reason to spend five years debating whether America is allowed to possess the infrastructure behind its own technology companies. And we are not building these things for a toy. We are building a general-purpose capability that will help people design, decide, analyze, automate, and discover. We still underestimate what these models are going to be able to do because the capability is moving faster than most organizations can absorb it. That is an argument for more capacity, not less. The countries with compute will experiment more, deploy more, learn faster, and create things the countries without it will have to purchase or beg to access. There is no safe third lane where America refuses to build data centers, avoids every disruption, keeps every old job exactly as it is, and somehow remains the technological leader. That option does not exist. We can build the infrastructure and shape what happens next, or we can slow ourselves down and become dependent on the countries that did not. I would rather deal with the problems created by moving forward than inherit the much larger problem created by falling behind. Every generation thinks its disruption is uniquely terrifying. We are not special. We will be fine — but only if we keep moving. Some jobs will change. Some old ways of doing business will die. New work, new companies, and new abilities will take their place. That is what progress looks like while you are living through it. China is not going to stop because Americans found a scary water graphic online. Neither should we. Build the power. Build the grid. Build the compute. Build the damn data centers. Progress is the point.