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In a bizarre joint advertisement for Liquid Death and Garage Beer, Super Bowl champ Jason Kelce calls on viewers to send their urine to data centers.
“AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water,” he claims, and so “we want your pee to cool these data centers.” Liquid Death’s vice president of creative explained that the sentiment is “literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now, across the spectrum.”
As a web developer, most of what I build runs on Amazon Web Services, which means data centers in Northern Virginia and Ohio. Every request that reaches our servers lands in one of those buildings. So does almost everything else people use without thinking about it, from email and banking to every app on a phone.
But I find myself increasingly alone in my position. Public opposition to artificial intelligence and the infrastructure needed to support it has crescendoed in recent months, and politicians are following suit. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an order “implementing the strictest standards in the nation for AI data centers,” while New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a moratorium on new hyperscale data centers.
Nor is this attitude limited to the Left. Florida Congressman Byron Donalds is running ads as part of his gubernatorial campaign promising to protect families from data centers that “jack up utility rates and make everything else more expensive.”
The trouble with this backlash is that the evidence doesn’t support it.
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Anti-data center arguments rest on three fears: that data-center buildouts are raising electricity bills for the Average Joe, that the infrastructure is consuming all of the drinking water and drying up rivers, and that the adoption of AI will ravage the job market. Under scrutiny, none of those hold up.
Consider the claim, voiced on both the Left and the Right, that data-center construction is raising everyone’s electricity bills. It’s true that rates are rising. But Manhattan Institute scholars Shawn Regan and Ken Girardin have shown that the real driver is regulation, since the sharpest increases came in states whose policies made producing and delivering electricity more expensive.
Data centers aren’t the culprit. In fact, a white paper by researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute and Watershed found the reverse. From 2015 to 2024, per-unit electricity costs fell as demand rose. Accounting for where developers choose to build, the authors estimate 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 be.
This is economies of scale at work. Transmission and distribution are natural monopolies carrying enormous fixed costs, spread across everything the system sells. A large, steady load absorbs a substantial share of them, and everyone’s average rate falls.
The water panic is just as unfounded. Data centers draw around 450 million gallons of water a day, according to the Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association. That’s roughly 0.3 to 0.4 percent of national water withdrawals. Golf course irrigation, meanwhile, uses an estimated 2 billion gallons of water a day.
As for jobs, technological innovation has historically created jobs in the long run while displacing them in the short term. In the early 1800s, handloom weavers smashed the new power looms. Wages cratered and many were displaced. Then textile manufacturing became Britain’s largest industry, employing more people than the cottage system ever had. Computing created more jobs than the typing pools it eliminated.
De-industrialist populism has set American innovation back before, with nuclear power in the late 1970s and 1980s and then with fracking. Both panics restricted the construction these energy sources required, and both set back environmentalism itself. Nuclear is among the cleanest sources of energy there is, and natural gas has lowered utility bills while displacing coal.
Ironically, a majority of Americans now say they would prefer a nuclear plant near their homes to a data center.
These neo-Luddites won’t lower a single utility bill, won’t return a gallon of water and won’t save a job. They’ll move the construction, the tax base and the computing to whoever will take them. Right now that’s China. Compute is the input to everything AI does, and 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. These decisions compound, because a moratorium relocates a buildout permanently and the supply chain and expertise follow the construction.
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Matias Ahrensdorf is a web developer at the Manhattan Institute.
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