You can't protest the building you use daily

The Amish Argument

$156 billion in data center projects got delayed or canceled last year.

142 activist groups across 24 states are working to block construction.

A Gallup poll in May found 71% of Americans oppose a data center being built near them.

And every one of those people used AI, cloud storage, or a streaming service that same day.

I call this the Amish argument.

You can walk away from electricity, the internet, modern infrastructure entirely.

What you can't do is use all of it and then protest the building that makes it work.

That ChatGPT question runs on a GPU inside a data center.

The photo you back up to iCloud lands on a server inside one.

Same for Netflix, online games, Zoom, your bank app, Google Maps.

There is no version of modern life that runs without them.

And history is not kind to this fight.

We fought cars when Ford started mass-producing them.

Power lines got the same treatment when electricity was new.

So did the interstate highways, and cell towers, and every piece of infrastructure that now feels invisible.

Every one of those fights looks ridiculous in hindsight.

Now, the concerns are real. I'm not waving them away.

Water usage, noise, strain on the power grid. All legitimate. All solvable.

But $156 billion in delayed infrastructure means one thing.

Slower AI, higher cloud costs, and the US falling behind countries that will build regardless.

China will build them. So will the UAE. So will Saudi Arabia.

The only question is whether we build here, or watch the compute move overseas and pay rent to access it.

We already ran this experiment once.

We let Taiwan make all the chips for 30 years...

Then panicked when we realized one geopolitical event could freeze the entire global supply chain.

Now we're spending $52 billion on the CHIPS Act trying to claw it back.

Do we really want to repeat that with compute itself?

Here's the part that matters for YOU, beyond the politics.

Jensen Huang put it at $7 trillion in global data center spending by the end of the decade.

600,000 factory workers short. 500,000 construction workers short.

The six-figure jobs of the next 20 years are in building and running this stuff.

The economic engine of the next two decades lives inside those buildings.

Being against data centers in 2026 is like being against power plants in 1920.

You don't have to love it.

But the people who understand where the infrastructure is going...

Are the ones who'll be standing in the right place when it gets there. 🫡

Did You Know?

The first commercial power plant, Edison's Pearl Street Station, opened in 1882 and served exactly 82 customers.

Neighbors complained about the noise and the strange new wires.

Within 40 years, refusing to connect to the grid was unthinkable.

Every essential technology starts as the thing the neighbors complain about. ⚡

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😂 Meme of the Day

Over to You...

Go look at where the infrastructure is heading this week...

And stand in the right place. 🔥

Jeff J. Hunter 

Founder, AI Persona Method | TheTip.ai

Get paid to solve problems like this → AI Certified Consultant

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