The US president has framed AI data centres as the defining economic resource of the coming decades, arguing they will deliver wealth and investment to communities even as inflation and borrowing costs weigh on households.
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Where I live, a data centre means three years of parish council meetings, a substation the size of a bungalow, and a promise of forty jobs that turn out to be six contractors and a security guard. Oil of the next fifty years. Marvellous. We can’t build a bypass without a judicial review, yet hyperscale server farms are meant to save us. Our grid connection queue alone will outlive most of the cabinet.
A data centre went up near my town last spring. It drinks more water than the entire village, the pylons arrived two years before the jobs did, and my mortgage has doubled regardless. They call this growth. They call it oil. Ours smells like a backup diesel generator and a rejected planning appeal. Fifty years of this? Charming.
The new oil, apparently. Funny — oil at least hired roughnecks. A data centre hires a security guard and a diesel backup. Communities get the water bill, the noise, the substation, and a tax abatement. Missing: proof. Show me the town that got richer rather than busier. Or admit the trickle only flows one way.
