Anti-AI Backlash Is a Gift to China, Writer Argues

As politicians on both sides of the aisle rush to crack down on AI data centers, one web developer is making an unconventional case: the backlash isn’t just based on bad economics—it’s geo-politically dangerous.

In an op-ed for the Daily Wire, Manhattan Institute web developer Matias Ahrensdorf takes aim at what he calls “AI nihilism,” arguing that popular fears about data centers draining water, spiking electricity bills, and destroying jobs are largely unfounded—and that the real consequence of the anti-AI movement will be handing America’s computing future to China.

A Growing Political Backlash

Ahrensdorf points to a wave of recent political moves against data centers. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has signed an order implementing what he called “the strictest standards in the nation for AI data centers,” while New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a moratorium on new hyperscale data centers. On the right, Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, running for governor, is running ads promising to protect families from data centers that “jack up utility rates and make everything else more expensive.”

The political temperature is rising even into pop culture. In a recent joint advertisement for Liquid Death and Garage Beer, Super Bowl champion Jason Kelce—in a bizarre bit—calls on viewers to send their urine to data centers, claiming that “AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water.” Liquid Death’s vice president of creative called the sentiment “literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now, across the spectrum.”

The Electrical Bill Myth

Ahrensdorf, who writes as a web developer whose own work runs on Amazon Web Services data centers in Northern Virginia and Ohio, says the evidence undercuts the panic.

On electricity costs, he acknowledges rates are rising—but cites Manhattan Institute scholars Shawn Regan and Ken Girardin to argue the real driver is regulation. States with the sharpest increases, he writes, are those whose policies made producing and delivering electricity more expensive.

He also points to a white paper by researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute and Watershed that found the opposite of the populist narrative: from 2015 to 2024, per-unit electricity costs actually fell as demand rose. The authors estimate that, accounting for where developers choose to build, the average American lives in a state where data-center capacity grew 160% since 2019, leaving residential rates roughly 6% lower than they otherwise would have been.

The reason is economies of scale. Transmission and distribution are natural monopolies with enormous fixed costs, spread across everything the system sells. A large, steady load—like a data center—absorbs a substantial share of those costs, lowering the average rate for everyone.

The Water Panic Is Equally Unfounded

On water, Ahrensdorf cites the Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association to note that data centers draw about 450 million gallons a day—roughly 0.3 to 0.4% of national water withdrawals. For scale, golf course irrigation uses an estimated 2 billion gallons a day.

“The water panic is just as unfounded,” he writes.

The Jobs Question

On jobs, Ahrensdorf acknowledges that technological innovation displaces workers in the short run but argues it has historically created more jobs in the long run. He cites the early 1800s, when handloom weavers smashed power looms: wages cratered and many were displaced—but textile manufacturing became Britain’s largest industry, employing more people than the cottage system ever had. Similarly, computing created more jobs than the typing pools it eliminated.

The China Angle

Ahrensdorf’s sharpest warning is geopolitical. He argues that the anti-data-center movement is a form of “de-industrialist populism” that has set American innovation back before—citing the nuclear power panics of the late 1970s and 1980s and later the anti-fracking movement. Both, he says, restricted the construction those energy sources required, setting back environmentalism in the process. Nuclear is among the cleanest energy sources we have, and natural gas has lowered utility bills while displacing coal.

He finds it ironic that a majority of Americans now say they’d prefer a nuclear plant near their homes to a data center.

But the bigger issue, he argues, is that these “neo-Luddites” won’t lower a single utility bill, return a gallon of water, or save a job. What they will do is move the construction, tax base, and computing capacity to whoever will take them—and right now, that’s China.

“Compute is the input to everything AI does,” Ahrensdorf writes. “A country that stops building it ends up renting it from one that didn’t, on terms set by a government that answers to nobody here.”

He warns the decisions are compounding—because a moratorium relocates a buildout permanently, and the supply chain and expertise follow the construction.

Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/ai-nihilism-wont-save-the-water-or-create-jobs-but-it-will-empower-china