Data centers have become a political punching bag in statehouses and town halls across the country, but the midterm election season has pushed the issue to the back burner, according to a new column from an energy policy advocate published by The Daily Wire. Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Power The Future, argues that politicians have shifted from “lecturing us about the evils of data centers” to focusing on winning votes — leaving the underlying challenge unaddressed.
Turner’s piece, titled “Three Visionary Solutions For America’s Data Center Crisis,” opens with a concession that runs against the grain of the current political conversation: America needs data centers. A culture built on streaming, smartphones, and constant connectivity demands them, he writes. The problem, in his framing, is not whether to build them but where — and whether unwilling communities should be forced to host them.
From there, Turner — who describes himself as neither an architect nor an urban planner — lays out three proposals he says are meant as “a starting point” for a national conversation.
Proposal One: Pair Tech Money With Stadium Land
The first idea revolves around what Turner sees as a strange mismatch. Tech companies have capital but need land. Professional sports teams have land — or at least access to large publicly subsidized sites — but want tax dollars for construction. His solution: bring the two together.
Turner points to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s deal to provide $850 million in taxpayer money for a new Buffalo Bills stadium on a 250-acre site, even as the state imposed a moratorium on data center construction. He suggests that pairing the two could turn more than 100 acres of parking lots into underground data center space.
The financial math, he argues, favors the idea. Meta is spending $50 billion on data centers in Louisiana alone, Turner notes — a figure that dwarfs the Bills’ $2.2 billion stadium price tag. A governor willing to broker such a deal, he writes, could get tech companies to foot the bill, deliver a stadium for the team, and generate jobs and revenue without taxpayers paying anything. He adds that nine more NFL teams and four MLB franchises are seeking new stadiums in the coming years, along with colleges and universities — a potential pipeline of underused parking acreage.
Proposal Two: Bury the ‘Humming Ugly Box’ Problem
Turner’s second proposal addresses the aesthetics and noise complaints that have fueled local opposition. Construction companies, he writes, will build data centers as quickly and cheaply as possible, while zoning rules may require sound-buffering materials and push back against drab, boxy designs.
His answer is to bury them. Underground data centers would cost more upfront, Turner acknowledges, but he argues the projected revenue outweighs the immediate expense. Burying the facilities would keep the land above as open green space, reduce cooling costs by keeping equipment out of direct sunlight, and satisfy rural communities that want tax revenue without the noise or the sight of a three-story beige building.
“A governor needs to use some political muscle to try it,” he writes. “It could be a winning option.”
Proposal Three: Bring the Data Centers to the Energy
The third idea flips the usual equation. Rather than building transmission infrastructure to bring power to data centers, Turner suggests bringing data centers to abundant, cheap energy sources — specifically the Permian Basin, the fossil fuel hub straddling the Texas-New Mexico border.
For many months this year, he notes, natural gas supply in the Permian was so abundant that prices went negative, with the region producing more gas than existing infrastructure could handle. Turner blames pipeline protests and permit denials by the Biden administration for leaving the country “years behind the curve,” and says the region has resorted to flaring gas that the world otherwise needs.
His proposal: build natural gas power plants in the Permian that are desperate for customers, and place data centers there to consume the electricity. The area, he writes, is mostly desert and uninhabited — meaning fewer protests, less farmland sold to developers, and a reliable, affordable power supply for AI workloads.
This stands in contrast to the current pattern, according to Turner, in which data centers are built in convenient locations that hurt small-town aesthetics and consume valuable farmland. “It does not have to be this way,” he writes.
A Critique of Political Incentives
Running through all three proposals is a broader argument about how elected officials approach problems. Turner contends that it is better politics to run on a problem than to fix one — that candidates prefer to “tackle” or “take on” an issue rather than resolve it. The result, he suggests, is a debate dominated by demagoguery and valueless campaign ads instead of concrete proposals.
He closes by inviting a real architect to take up the question, framing his own ideas as an amateur’s contribution to a conversation he believes is being neglected. “Data centers are coming,” he writes. “We can either think of creative ways to get a good option, or we can watch candidates cut more valueless campaign ads.”
Turner runs Power The Future, which describes itself as a national nonprofit advocating for American energy jobs, and also operates a sheep and cattle farm in rural Virginia. His column reflects a perspective increasingly audible in the data center debate: that the technology is inevitable, the local opposition is real, and the political class is not serious about bridging the two.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/three-visionary-solutions-for-americas-data-center-crisis