Category: Ai data center
How data centers could spark the next populist revolt
Everyone keeps promising that artificial intelligence will deliver wonders beyond imagination — medical breakthroughs, massive productivity gains, boundless prosperity. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But one outcome is already clear: If data centers keep driving up Americans’ electricity bills, AI will quickly become a political liability.
Across the country, data center expansion has already helped push electricity prices up 13% over the past year, and voters are starting to push back.
Handled correctly, AI can strengthen America. Handled poorly — by letting data centers overwhelm the grid and drive families toward energy poverty — it will accelerate decline.
In recent months, plans for massive new data centers in Virginia, Maryland, Texas, and Arizona have stalled or collapsed under local backlash. Ordinary Americans have packed town halls and flooded city councils, demanding protection from corporate projects that devour land, drain water supplies, and strain already fragile power grids.
These communities are not rejecting technology. They are rejecting exploitation. As one local official in Chandler, Arizona, told a developer bluntly, “If you can’t show me what’s in it for Chandler, then we’re not having a conversation.”
The problem runs deeper than zoning fights or aesthetics. America’s monopoly utility model shields data centers from the true cost of the strain they impose on the grid. When a facility requires new substations, transmission lines, or transformers — or when its relentless demand drives up electricity prices — utilities spread those costs across every household and small business in the service area.
That arrangement socializes the costs of Big Tech’s growth while privatizing the gains. It also breeds populist anger.
A better approach sits within reach: neighborhood battery programs that put communities first.
Whole-home battery systems continue to gain traction. Rooftop solar panels, small generators, or off-peak grid power can recharge them. Batteries store electricity when it’s cheap and abundant, then release it when demand spikes or outages hit. They protect families from blackouts, lower monthly utility bills, and sometimes allow homeowners to sell power back to the grid.
One policy shift should become non-negotiable: Approval for new data centers should hinge on funding neighborhood battery programs in the communities they impact.
In practice, that requirement would push tech companies to help install home battery systems in nearby neighborhoods, delivering backup power, grid stability, and real relief on electric bills. These distributed batteries would form a flexible, local energy reserve — absorbing peak demand instead of worsening it.
RELATED: Your laptop is about to become a casualty of the AI grift
Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Most importantly, this model reverses the flow of benefits. Working families would no longer subsidize Big Tech’s expansion while receiving nothing in return. Communities would share directly in the upside.
Access to local land, water, and electricity should come with obligations. Companies that consume enormous public resources should invest in the people who live alongside them — not leave residents stranded when the grid buckles.
Politicians who ignore this gathering backlash risk sleepwalking into a revolt. The choice is straightforward: Build an energy system that serves citizens who keep the country running, or face their fury when they realize they have been sacrificed for someone else’s high-tech gold rush.
Handled correctly, AI can strengthen America. Handled poorly — by letting data centers overwhelm the grid and drive families toward energy poverty — it will accelerate decline.
We still have time to choose. Let’s choose wisely.
Your laptop is about to become a casualty of the AI grift
Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology at the expense of the technology they actually need.
The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers — sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, “It takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.”
Shortages will hit consumers hard in the coming year.
That framing ignores what is being sacrificed — and distorted — in the process.
Beyond the destruction of rural communities and the strain placed on national energy capacity, government favoritism toward AI infrastructure is warping markets. Capital that once sustained the hardware and software ecosystem of the digital economy is being siphoned into subsidized “AI factories,” chasing artificial general intelligence instead of cheaper, more efficient investments in narrow AI.
Thanks to fiscal, monetary, tax, and regulatory favoritism, the result is free chatbot slop and an increasingly scarce, expensive supply of laptops, phones, and consumer hardware.
Subsidies break the market
For decades, consumer electronics stood as one of the greatest deflationary success stories in modern economics. Unlike health care or education — both heavily monopolized by government — the computer industry operated with relatively little distortion. From December 1997 to August 2015, the CPI for “personal computers and peripheral equipment” fell 96%. Over that same period, medical care, housing, and food costs rose between 80% and 200%.
That era is ending.
AI data centers are now crowding out consumer electronics. Major manufacturers such as Dell and Samsung are scaling back or discontinuing entire product lines because they can no longer secure components diverted to AI chip production.
Prices for phones and laptops are rising sharply. Jobs tied to consumer electronics — especially the remaining U.S.-based assembly operations — are being squeezed out in favor of data center hardware that benefits a narrow set of firms.
This is policy-driven distortion, not organic market evolution.
Through initiatives like Stargate and hundreds of billions in capital pushed toward data center expansion, the government has created incentives for companies to abandon consumer hardware in favor of AI infrastructure. The result is shortages that will hit consumers hard in the coming year.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are retooling factories to prioritize AI-grade silicon for data centers instead of personal devices. DRAM production is being routed almost entirely toward servers because it is far more profitable to leverage $40,000 AI chips than $500-$800 laptops. In the fourth quarter of 2025, contract prices for certain 16GB DDR5 chips rose nearly 300% as supply was diverted. Dell and Lenovo have already imposed 15%-30% price hikes on PCs, citing insatiable AI-sector demand.
The chip crunch
The situation is deteriorating quickly. DRAM inventory levels are down 80% year over year, with just three weeks of supply on hand — down from 9.5 weeks in July. SK Hynix expects shortages to persist through late 2027. Samsung has announced it is effectively out of inventory and has more than doubled DDR5 contract prices to roughly $19-$20 per unit. DDR5 is now standard across new consumer and commercial desktops and laptops, including Apple MacBooks.
Samsung has also signaled it may exit the SSD market altogether, deeming it insufficiently glamorous compared with subsidized data center investments. Nvidia has warned it may cut RTX 50 series production by up to 40%, a move that would drive up the cost of entry-level gaming systems.
Shrinkflation is next. Before the data center bubble, the market was approaching a baseline of 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs for entry-level laptops. As memory is diverted to enterprise customers, manufacturers will revert to 8GB systems with slower storage to keep prices under $999 — ironically rendering those machines incapable of running the very AI applications they’re working on.
Real innovation sidelined
The damage extends beyond prices. Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators.
This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly. The United States is not. Instead, firms like Roomba, which experimented with practical autonomy, are collapsing — only to be acquired by the Chinese!
This is not a free market. Between tax incentives, regulatory favoritism, land-use carve-outs, capital subsidies, and artificially suppressed interest rates, the government has created an arms race for a data center bubble China itself is not pursuing. Each round of monetary easing inflates the same firms’ valuations, enabling further speculative investment divorced from consumer need.
RELATED: China’s AI strategy could turn Americans into data mines
Grafissimo via iStock/Getty Images
Hype over utility
As Charles Hugh Smith recently noted, expanding credit boosts asset prices, which then serve as collateral for still more leverage — allowing capital-rich firms to outbid everyone else while hollowing out the broader economy.
The pattern is familiar. Consider the Ford plant in Glendale, Kentucky, where 1,600 workers were laid off after the collapse of government-favored electric vehicle investments. That facility is now being retooled to produce batteries for data centers. When one subsidy collapses, another replaces it.
We are trading convention for speculation. Conventional technology — reliable hardware, the internet, mobile computing — delivers proven, measurable utility. The current investment surge into artificial general intelligence is based on hypothetical future returns propped up by state power.
The good old laptop is becoming collateral damage in what may prove to be the largest government-induced tech bubble yet.
