Since returning to office, President Trump has made the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) a key focal point of his second administration. Just last week, the president signed an executive order launching the “Genesis Mission,” a new “national effort” that seeks to utilize AI to “transform how scientific research is conducted and accelerate the speed of scientific discovery.”
“With the Genesis Mission, the Trump Administration intends to dramatically expand the productivity and impact of Federal research and development within a decade,” the order reads.
While AI appears poised to become a major facet of everyday life moving forward, there’s a negative underside to this burgeoning technology that is wreaking havoc on communities across the country: AI data centers.
In recent months, numerous reports have emerged about how these facilities are putting a strain on local residents. Namely, how they are consuming vast amounts of land, electricity, and water, which in turn is driving up costs for locals in the area.
Speaking with The Federalist, Power the Future (PTF) Founder and Executive Director Daniel Turner noted the current stress these AI data centers are placing on everyday Americans and espoused concerns that “we’re not remotely building the infrastructure needed to accommodate” this growing technology.
“The surge in electricity consumption is like nothing we have ever seen before, and we’re not remotely prepared for what AI means. We have just begun to scratch the surface,” Turner said.
Existing Problems
According to IBM, AI data centers are designed to house “the specific IT infrastructure needed to train, deploy and deliver AI applications and services.” These facilities are equipped with “advanced compute, network and storage architectures and energy and cooling capabilities to handle AI workloads.”
The construction of these massive new data warehouses, however, comes with a significant cost.
As noted by Turner, due to AI’s advanced capabilities and functionality, AI data centers consume “roughly eight times the amount of electricity” than that of regular data centers. One analysis published last year estimated that “[r]ising consumption will drive significant cost increases — stemming from demand growth for power as a commodity and from demand for the electric grid to deliver power to data centers.”
Increased electricity consumption by these AI data centers is already placing high demands on local electric grids and producing higher utility bills for residents, according to various reports. And that’s especially true for individuals in states like Virginia, a data center hotspot where electricity bills “are on track to rise … [by] as much as 25 percent” by 2030 due to the increased power demands from the facilities.
In his conversation with The Federalist, Turner compared the rapid growth of AI data centers to a local government greenlighting the development of hundreds of new family homes in a small community but not building out the local infrastructure to compensate for it.
“The county loves it because they see new sources of tax revenue, but all of a sudden those homes are lived in and no one did a thing to improve the little, tiny dirt road [or] the school,” Turner said. “All you know is that your kid is now in class with a million people and your little, tiny dirt road has bumper-to-bumper traffic on it, and you scratch your head and say, ‘Why the hell do I want more development?'”
“That’s the type of infrastructure that I compare to AI,” he continued. “We are building these things so damn fast that by the time they are online and activated, the problems are already built in, and then we go to our elected officials and say, ‘Help!’ and they give us the finger and say, ‘Yeah, too bad. Deal with it.'”
A Growing Political Issue
As the presence and effects of AI data centers have increased, so too have frustrations among local residents.
Last month, WIRED published an article featuring remarks from Peter Hubbard, one of two Democrat candidates to win seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission (which “regulates the state’s electric utility”) in the November elections. According to the outlet, “It’s the first time Democrats have won statewide seats in statewide elections in Georgia in nearly two decades.”
While speaking with WIRED, Hubbard disclosed that while affordability was the “number one issue” raised by voters during his campaign stops throughout the state, “a very close second was data centers and the concern around them just sucking up the water, the electricity, the land — and not really paying any taxes.”
While both Republicans and Democrats have voiced concerns about the negative impacts of AI data centers on local residents, the latter are seemingly using the issue as part of their “affordability” messaging against Trump and Republicans.
In addition to Georgia, several Virginia Democrats made confronting the data center problem a facet of their respective campaigns. When asked about the issue at an October town hall, for example, now-Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger said, depending on how litigation involving a state-based energy provider shakes out, “it may require action within the General Assembly to ensure that large utility users like data centers are paying their fair share for the energy that they consume.”
“President Trump is the perfect foil for anything that goes wrong at the state level,” Turner said. You have these “governors and state officials who are thrilled with the data centers because they see it as tax revenue [and more] construction jobs. … Then, when the electricity prices go through the roof, you get to blame the president and say, ‘President Trump promised to lower electricity prices,’ and you get to wash your hands [of any culpability].”
Potential Solutions
So, how can America outpace its competitors in AI development without wrecking the wallets and communities of everyday citizens?
Citing recommendations from a May 2025 Power the Future report, Turner said one of the “first” things the Trump administration should do is focus on reopening all of the fossil fuel plants, mines, and projects “turned off by the Biden administration” to increase the supply of energy. “The second thing,” he noted, is to develop a national plan that focuses on moving AI data center development from urban areas to remote ones frequented with abundant energy sources.
“You can build a data center anywhere. Why are we not building them on the north slope of Alaska where there is tons of natural gas, tons of water, tons of land? … Why are we not building them on the Permian Basin where there’s so much natural gas [that] we flare it [and are] literally lighting it on fire because we can’t build pipelines fast enough to capture it and sell it?” Turner said. “We seem to be building these data centers where our elected officials want to cut ribbons and have glorious ceremonies, but that doesn’t help the community.”