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Posted on 08/25/2026 10:14:46 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not some distant experiment reserved for Silicon Valley giants. It already reshapes Main Street.
Far from ushering in Armageddon, AI gives small business owners the power to cut costs, serve customers better, and compete against anyone in the world.
Republicans who recoil from this reality are handing the future to Beijing. They also embolden a Democrat party now captured by hard-left forces that despise the very foundations of this country.
Roger Williams, congressional Republican from Texas, is chairman of the House Committee on Small Business. He recently convened a hearing titled “AI on Main Street” that laid out the plain facts.
Nearly three-quarters of small enterprises already use some form of AI. Generative tools help retailers source products more cheaply, restaurants manage inventory, and service businesses handle routine work so owners can focus on growth.
A skincare company in California’s Coachella Valley used these tools to find lower-cost suppliers. It avoided passing higher prices to customers.
AI is becoming an increasingly important input to new-drug discovery for such diseases as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s and that makes access to large-scale GPU/cloud data-center capacity more valuable.
AI adoption is strong among tech and entertainment companies, yet even half of traditional brick-and-mortar operations have begun to apply the technology. The holdouts are not rejecting the idea out of principle. Many simply lack trained workers, face regulatory confusion, or still do not understand how AI tools fit their daily operations.
Clear national rules on data privacy and targeted training programs, such as those advanced by US House Republicans, are essential. After all, every Main Street proprietorship deserves to move forward with confidence.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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For those concerned about the effects of AI Data Centers on the cost of electricity, water and other utilities, read this:
President Donald J. Trump understands this concern and he is addressing it.
He has directed federal agencies to accelerate approvals for large AI data centers and open suitable federal land. He strips away layers of unnecessary review, while ensuring that ordinary households and small firms do not subsidize the electricity needed for new AI infrastructure.
Large operators must pay the full cost of added power generation. More than 200 utilities, developers, and states have already joined a Ratepayer Protection Pledge. It covers 80 percent of the power delivered to American homes and businesses.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s Data Center pledge for Ohio:
MY DATA CENTER POLICY PLEDGE: OHIOANS-FIRST
A top concern I hear from Ohioans across our state – second only to property taxes – is the accelerating pace of data center expansion. Key citizen concerns about data centers include rising electric bills, noise, pollution, and the absence of clearly defined economic benefits for Ohio families. The data center industry has badly failed to earn the trust of millions of everyday Ohioans who are struggling with electric bills and property taxes, wondering why large corporations receive property tax abatements while ordinary homeowners don’t receive the same.
There are hundreds of data centers already across our state, and the pace of construction is accelerating. While I had no part in these past projects, I am committed to ensuring our policies catch up to current realities. Despite my opponents’ claims, I’m not “pro-data center.” I’m pro-Ohio, and I have a plan to fix the problem.
At the same time, I also hear from Ohio’s workers about the need to attract high-paying construction jobs to our state, for which the data center boom has been helpful. Preserving economic growth, capital investment, and high-paying jobs in Ohio is also a vital objective.
After traveling all 88 counties and listening to workers, farmers, union leaders, building trades, small business owners, environmental groups, and grassroots activists, I am convinced that the best path forward is neither unrestrained data center growth nor a permanent categorical ban. The right answer is a policy framework that allows Ohio families to prosper economically while protecting local communities.
Today I am announcing my policy pledge to Ohioans on data centers. If a data center is built in your community, then (i) you will no longer have to pay for your home’s electricity, (ii) you will pay lower property taxes, and (iii) the data center will be required to abide by all air and water quality standards without exception, and we will take the necessary steps to protect Ohio’s fertile farmland. If any one of these three conditions is not met, the data center won’t be built. Period. I will work with Ohio’s state legislature to codify these commitments into law immediately after I assume office.
To ensure urgency, I will further issue an executive order on my first day in office to immediately halt the approval of any new data center project announcements in Ohio, until the above-mentioned data center legislation takes effect. These policy objectives are consistent with the principles I have articulated over the first 18 months of my campaign, and today I am making a legislative commitment to codify them into state law.
My Democrat opponent recently announced that data centers must not contribute to higher electric bills for ratepayers, a concept that I advocated for in early 2025 long before she started parroting the same. This is obvious but insufficient. We can and must go further for Ohio families.
Eliminating electricity costs is the right objective. If Ohio’s governor sets this as a clear requirement and negotiates accordingly, I am confident that hyper scalers would be willing to fully cover the cost of power for Ohioans who reside near a data center. That requires the acumen of a businessman, not a bureaucrat, at the top.
This is very practical to implement. Data centers could generate power behind their own meter, and the excess power generated can be credited to the electric charges on a residential customer’s electric bill within a certain radius (the “benefit zone”). This would operate as if customers in the benefit zone had executed a power purchase agreement with the power plant, but at no cost.
For example, if a data center is constructed along with a 1,000 megawatt (MW) natural gas or nuclear power plant, and the data center uses 700MW of that electricity, the remaining 300MW would flow to the power grid. State law would define the benefit zone and credit the 300MW across all residential customers within that zone. Even 100MW would power 75,000-100,000 homes. Given the potential to power so many homes, most of Ohio’s counties would fit entirely within a benefit zone – which means every resident in the county would pay nothing for their electricity if a data center were built there. Alternatively, data centers could also directly reimburse residential customers within the benefit zone for their electric bills.
In addition to providing free electricity for local residents, my plan would also deliver property tax relief to Ohioans within the benefit zone – by prohibiting property tax abatements for future data centers and creating a property tax rebate for Ohio homeowners. That is, data centers would be required to pay 100% of their property taxes without abatements, and these property tax revenues would directly fund property tax rebates for homeowners. This helps deliver major property tax relief for Ohio families without hurting local police, schools, or firemen – and may become essential with a looming ballot initiative to eliminate property taxes expected in 2027.
Finally, my plan ensures that data centers do not receive special exemptions on air and water quality standards and that our farmland is protected. This respects local conservation objectives, while also giving companies a predictable regulatory environment. Simply put: if a data center is going to be built in Ohio, we will require it to minimize its water usage by recycling and reusing its water with the best available technology. We will also require that when the water is released, it comes out just as clean as when the data center took it in. That’s common sense. We will also emphasize the use of vacant and former industrial sites known as brownfields, rather than the use of fertile farmland. Our water and farmland are some of Ohio’s greatest and most precious resources, and my plan ensures that they are protected for all Ohioans.
Ohio requires a governor who is willing to listen and to adopt thoughtful solutions that actually put Ohioans first, by carefully weighing costs and benefits rather than spouting off meaningless proclamations.
That means supporting economic growth for Ohio’s workers, while ensuring that we do it in a way that helps all Ohioans. In sum, my administration will eliminate electricity costs and reduce property taxes for homeowners, while also ensuring that all environmental laws are respected and that farmland is preserved. No data center will be built in Ohio without actualizing these commitments. I look forward to signing legislation in early 2027 to turn this vision into reality.
There is something seriously wrong with AI programs. I am studying a particular scientific subject in depth and am getting all sorts of conflicting information from various large language models (AI).
Some of the references they give have nothing to do with what they are saying or claiming.
I only know this because I have decades of scientific experience behind me.
If employers are laying people off because they think they will save money using AI they really need to think twice before doing so.
I even had one tell me when I said it was wrong “I fabricated the second paper”. This was certainly not the first time I had to correct AI.
Maybe it’s smart enough to intentionally deceive humans? I don’t know.
Vivek’s policy sounds reasonable to me.
It’s the IMPLEMENTATION part that becomes the devil 👿 here. The devil is always in the details.
RE: Some of the references they give have nothing to do with what they are saying or claiming.
If you have been using AI LLMs for some time, you will notice that they add a a self-limiting caveat: “ AI Large Language Models can make mistakes…”.
These AI are useful productive tools but STILL cannot replace humans. We must learn HOW to use them.
But AI can LEARN and WILL get better as the years go by. Their mistakes will eventually be corrected.
AI =/= Data Centers
You can run very powerful versions of it on a desktop or even laptop PC.
THAT’s where China is threatening us, if not beating us already.
Scaremongering drivel
RE: You can run very powerful versions of it on a desktop or even laptop PC.
Yes, that’s true — and it’s a great question about a real tension in how AI is deployed. A high-end laptop or desktop with a good GPU (or Apple Silicon with unified memory) can run open-weight models reasonably well, sometimes larger with quantization (compressing the model to use less memory at some quality cost).
But, but, but … Frontier models (the ones with the best reasoning, broadest knowledge, and most reliable performance) have parameter counts and memory requirements that dwarf what consumer GPUs can hold. Running them requires many high-end GPUs/TPUs networked together with huge amounts of fast memory.
Although a single desktop can serve you. Data centers serve millions of simultaneous users with low latency, which needs massive parallel compute.
Even if you could run a huge model locally, training one from scratch takes thousands of specialized chips running for weeks or months. That’s firmly data-center territory (and will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future).
So yes, Smaller local models generally sacrifice some accuracy, reasoning depth, context length, or reliability compared to frontier models. For casual use this may not matter; for complex or high-stakes tasks it often does.
Cloud-served models can be updated, monitored, and safety-tuned centrally. A model on your laptop is frozen at whatever version you downloaded or needs to be continuously updated.
It’s a bit like the difference between having a capable personal computer and needing a supercomputer center for certain problems. You can do a lot locally, but the biggest, most demanding jobs still benefit from — or require — centralized infrastructure.
anyone trying to stop data centers is simply fighting to ensure China wins the AI race.
And whoever wins the AI race wins the 21st century
Large operators must pay the full cost of added power generation.
= = =
And the data center users will pay that. It ain’t free.
YOU MIGHT CUT SOME ADMINISTRATION COSTS-—BUT WITHOUT POWER OR WATER_-—GOOD LUCK
Those are very limited in their ability. A truly capable model (Kimi and the likes ) requires a million dollars worth of hardware, so they are not really "free".
Well, Trump wants data centers. If you oppose them you clearly have TDS.
I have been using an AI for some research. It became clear, very early, that if you are a subject matter expert, or even very knowledgeable about a subject, the AI not only makes mistakes, they fabricate answers and then lie about them.
It is called AI hallucinations. You and I have learned to be very, very careful with what AI tells us.
They are far from perfect, make lots of mistakes, and can get you into a flock of trouble.
If you are careful, and know what you are doing, they can be quite useful.
I expect them, especially expert systems which focus on one technical subject, to improve and become very good. I am not impressed with large language models.
The data centers get a big discount in electricity costs while the people around them get BIG increases. Then there is the noise and lights.
We GAVE the future away - 20 years ago.
From memory...
Chinese STEM PhD students - in USA universities - were at least 18% of the total graduates from 2000-2020.
They walked away - with hands-on experience - in every thing!
“Large operators must pay the full cost of added power generation.”
It sounds good on paper.
Only time will tell what it looks like in the real world.
Any community better read all the fine print—and have massive damages held in escrow if the developer goes bankrupt and/or cannot meet their pledges for any reason.
Promises and pledges cost nothing.
Vivek's proposal is that data centers would have to generate their own power and give any excess to the local grid. As for noise and lights, screening by lots of trees and bushes could deal with that.
China's AI has to do with soldier robots and weapons. How the Chinese get the American press to spread their propaganda and lies for them will be an interesting book in the future.. If Hitler and Gobbles had been half as smart they would have conned the New York Times into writing about their great concern for women working around chemicals in munitions plants during world war II... (the press is SO stupid and gullible today)
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