The AI Data Center Boom: The Heist Continues

by Zack Kaldveer  

Something is wrong in America, and people know it.

For decades, working people have watched the cost of housing, healthcare, education and everyday life climb while wealth and power have become concentrated in fewer hands. They have watched corporations receive tax breaks while families struggle with bills. They have watched decisions affecting their jobs, neighborhoods and futures increasingly made by people they will never meet, in rooms they will never enter.

Now another enormous economic transformation is underway. And once again, ordinary Americans are being asked to pick up part of the tab.

The artificial-intelligence revolution may sound as though it exists somewhere in “the cloud.” But the cloud is very much on the ground. AI requires enormous data centers that consume extraordinary amounts of electricity and water, require major infrastructure investments and often benefit from The AI Data Center Boom: The Heist Continues billions of dollars in public subsidies.

For the people living alongside them, those costs aren't theoretical. They can show up in electricity bills, demands on local water supplies, pollution concerns, public infrastructure costs and decisions about their communities over which they may have remarkably little control.

Meanwhile, some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in human history stand to become wealthier still. If that feels familiar, it should.

More than half a century ago, corporate attorney Lewis Powell wrote a memo urging American business to organize aggressively to increase its influence over government, courts, universities, media and public opinion. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? traces what followed: a decades-long transformation that weakened organized labor, reduced corporate taxes and regulation, concentrated wealth and helped translate enormous economic power into political power.

The AI data-center boom offers a striking new chapter in that story.

Private fortunes, public costs

The scale is staggering. Electricity demand from AI and data centers is rising so rapidly that utilities and governments are confronting major questions about who will pay for the new power generation, transmission and other infrastructure needed to serve them.

Water presents another challenge. California communities already facing long-term water pressures often don't even have access to basic information about how much water individual data centers use. Data centers directly consumed an estimated 17 billion gallons nationally in 2023, and researchers have projected enormous additional demands as the industry expands.

And concerns increasingly extend beyond how much water data centers consume to what they may leave behind. Recent investigations have documented wastewater disputes and enforcement actions involving data-center projects across several states, involving contaminants ranging from bacteria and heavy metals to PFAS “forever chemicals.”

Then there are the subsidies.

States and communities competing for data centers have offered companies billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives. In Georgia, for example, Good Jobs First found that data-center tax exemptions cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars while generating a fraction of that amount in new tax revenue.

Supporters point to construction jobs, and those jobs can be substantial—including good-paying union work. But many last only as long as construction does, while demands on electricity, water and public infrastructure can continue for decades.

That leaves communities with a basic question: Are we getting a fair deal?

Because people aren't abstractions in an economic-development spreadsheet. They are families trying to pay utility bills. Workers wondering whether AI will ultimately eliminate their jobs. Parents thinking about the world their children will inherit. Residents wondering who gets their community's water, who pays for new infrastructure and why corporations worth trillions of dollars need public subsidies in the first place.

When economic power becomes political power

That question takes us directly to one of Heist's central arguments: concentrated economic power doesn't remain economic for long. It becomes political power.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin offers a vivid example. As AI drives enormous new investment and wealth creation, Brin has also poured more than $100 million into California political efforts opposing a proposed tax on billionaire wealth.

The point isn't simply that one billionaire opposes one tax. It is what that level of spending tells us about power. A schoolteacher, electrician or nurse can vote, organize and speak out. A billionaire can do those things too—and deploy a fortune capable of reshaping an entire political debate.

That is the dynamic Heist warned about.

More than half a century after the Powell Memo called on corporate America to organize to reshape the country's politics and institutions, the data-center boom offers a striking picture of where that redistribution of power has led. A handful of extraordinarily wealthy companies and individuals are helping shape the next economy and “AI revolution” while communities are left with the bills, depleted resources, pollution and relatively few permanent jobs.

Private fortunes grow. Public costs remain.

But people are pushing back

This story isn't finished.

Across the country, communities are questioning data-center projects, demanding greater transparency and challenging arrangements they believe put corporate interests ahead of residents. Political resistance has emerged across ideological lines, and lawmakers have proposed everything from stronger disclosure requirements to a temporary moratorium on new AI data-center development.

Because the lesson of Heist isn't that ordinary people are powerless. It's that power is built. Corporate America understood that when Powell wrote his memo more than 50 years ago. It organized, invested, built institutions and changed the rules.

Those rules can change again.

The important question about AI, then, isn't simply whether the technology is good or bad. It's who will control this transformation. Who will profit from it. Who will pay for it. And who gets to decide.

We are living through another consequential moment in the struggle over who the American economy is designed to serve. A new generation is confronting unaffordable housing, crushing college costs and student debt, inaccessible healthcare, climate change - and now an AI revolution that could transform both work and daily life.

None of these struggles exists outside history.

We can't win the battles of the future without understanding how we got here.

That is why Heist matters now.

What was built can be unbuilt.