Data centers are large buildings full of machines that process what we do on our phones and computers.
Artificial intelligence requires more computing power, so companies are eager to build more data centers.
The usual suspects panic.
“We have to stop!” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“Slow down!” want Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.).
Data centers use a lot of energy, and they need water to cool themselves because their computers generate heat.
A single facility can use as much energy and water as a small city.
“Uses resources like crazy!” said another protester.
Last year, protesters blocked or halted at least 48 data center projects.
Another opponent fired 13 bullets into the home of an Indiana politician because he supports data centers.
Now the AOC and Sanders have introduced a bill that would stop new data center construction.
That’s just dumb.
“If our economy was allowed to grow at Bernie Sanders’ pace, we would be in a lot of trouble,” said Paige Lambermont of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“If we slow down, other countries will not succeed. You will get a Chinese version of AI approved rather than an AI version of American inventors.”
He downplays the fear of rising electricity prices.
So far, “nowhere have prices been raised,” said Lambermont.
“Prices in Virginia are going up less than other places, even though more data centers are in Northern Virginia than anywhere else.”
The Institute for Energy Research found “no statistically significant relationship between data center concentration and rapid increases in electricity prices.”
However, as the demand for AI grows, there the will be the price increase.
But that’s because short-sighted politicians have limited our use of more efficient fuels, like natural gas and nuclear power, in favor of wind and solar power.
“If we hadn’t done that,” Lambermont said, “we would probably have between 100 and 200 gigawatts of slack capacity already on the grid.”
Part of the problem: Government regulations that say only the government, or a government-sanctioned business, can generate and sell energy.
And government officials are unbelievably slow.
Microsoft is now suffering from that because it made a deal with Constellation Energy to restart the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island.
The repaired plant will be able to produce power next year, but our government will not allow Microsoft to do it use it that power – until the rest utilities build power lines in between the rest provinces, some of which are hundreds of kilometers away.
Government regulations are stopping so much progress.
A company can avoid burdensome regulations by building its own plant, off the grid.
Elon Musk did just that, setting up gas turbines to run his supercomputer in Tennessee.
“If you’re Elon Musk, you can build your own,” Lambermont noted, “but most people don’t have the money to build a gas or nuclear plant.”
Even if they couldn’t, why would they invest billions when the next politicians in power might be socialist luddites?
“No one wants to invest in something that the next presidential administration can come and say, ‘Well, it was illegal all along,'” lamented Lambermont.
Some in Congress now want to make it easier to build off-grid energy.
“You can do new and exciting things when you make your own and make your own rules,” says Lambermont. “It’s just the way that all the big technological advances we’ve had in other areas have happened through it.
“It’s never been the government that has come up with progress. It’s usually private actors who do interesting things and try to figure out what works.”
Data centers, he adds, “use a lot of resources, but they’re also the most productive things we’ve done in human history.”
Generally, productive things happen only when the government gets out of the way.
John Stossel is the author of the book “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became a Freedom News Hit.”
