The Lies They're Telling Towns and Tribes About the Benefits of AI Data Centers

I really "enjoyed" (read: didn't enjoy at all) this recent piece in The Atlantic (non-paywalled archive link) proclaiming that the backlash to AI data centers is "overblown." It's part of a broader effort by our affluent brunchlord press to dismiss the massive bipartisan opposition to AI data centers as a sort of inauthentic hysteria or un-American foreign influence op.

One lie that companies have been telling local municipalities is that if they greenlight a massive local AI data center, it will immediately bring a flood of savvy innovators to your podunk-ass town.

The Atlantic piece introduces the lie this way:

Michael Mandel, the chief economist for the Progressive Policy Institute, told me that employment gains are likely to grow as new data centers attract businesses that use AI. Companies using the technology for advanced applications—such as for autonomous vehicles and medical research—may benefit from proximity to these centers, because information can travel faster from source to user. The margin is imperceptible to most people using Claude or ChatGPT, but for companies that depend on real-time AI-powered decision making at scale, tiny differences in latency matter. The kinds of businesses that will drive the AI economy are thus likely to set up in communities that invest in data centers.

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is, just so we're clear, not progressive. Or an institute in any meaningful sense. It's one of countless corporate-sponsored "nonprofit" think tanks that obscure their funding sources and try to dress up greed (and a relentless desire for no corporate oversight) as a meaningful intellectual argument people should seriously engage with.

These organizations are useful to corporate power because they parrot the goals and aims of corporate power, but they do so under a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-academic veneer designed to trick news audiences into believing they're reading the scientific insights of an objective subject matter expert.

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