A Marine veteran and mother of five in Red Oak, Texas stood up at a city council meeting to oppose a data center campus being built next door to her farm. Every single person in the room agreed with her. The council approved it anyway. Welcome to the AI boom, where the tech industry gets the profits and your neighborhood gets the concrete.
200 Times Larger and Nobody's Slowing Down
Here is the number that should stop you cold. According to CBS News, a large data center two years ago consumed roughly five megawatts of power. A new AI data center can consume 1,000 megawatts. That is not a modest upgrade. That is a different category of industrial machine being dropped into communities that signed up for nothing of the sort.
And they are multiplying fast. The United States already has more than 3,000 data centers, with another 1,500 proposed, according to CBS News's reporting. Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft alone are expected to spend $1.5 trillion building them through next year. That is not a buildout. That is a land rush.
Michael Webber, a University of Texas professor who advises tech companies on energy and water use, told CBS News that the speed and scale of AI-era construction is genuinely unprecedented. His advice to the companies knocking on his door is almost comically blunt: "Don't be a jerk. Don't take the water. Don't break the grid. Don't ruin the land." The fact that this needs to be said out loud, to trillion-dollar corporations, tells you something about the state of affairs.
One Texas Town That Did Not Get a Vote
Jazmin Villegas lives on a quiet farm just outside Dallas. When she found out a data center campus nearly three times the size of an existing facility nearby was coming in next door, she did what Marines do. She organized.
She told CBS News she didn't think her service ended when she took off the uniform. She started showing up to town halls, rallying neighbors, and asking the basic questions any reasonable person would ask: What chemicals are involved? What happens to the air, the water, the noise? What exactly is being built here, and who decided?
The answer to that last question turned out to be the Red Oak city council, which Villegas and other residents accused of operating in secrecy. At a packed town hall, she says, not one single person in the room supported the data center. The council approved it anyway. "Instead of feeling defeated," she told CBS News, "it's like, 'Oh. Challenge accepted.'" She is still fighting.
The Grievances Are Stacking Up Nationwide
Texas is not alone. In Loudoun County, Virginia, which CBS News identifies as having the world's highest concentration of data centers, electricity bills have surged over the past year. Residents are directly connecting the dots between massive power consumption next door and what they're seeing on their monthly statements.
In Chandler, Arizona, the concern is water. The state is already watching its supply shrink, and residents at town halls are asking why data centers, which use water to cool their server racks, are being handed approvals in a desert. The grief is real and specific. These are not abstract fears about technology. They are people watching a resource they depend on being claimed by an industry that chose their zip code.
And across the country, CBS News found that data centers have become lightning rods for bigger anxieties: rising costs, the unchecked power of the tech elite, AI threatening jobs, and the creeping sense that decisions about the future are being made by a small number of enormously wealthy people who will not be living next to the generators. That is not paranoia. That is an accurate read of the situation.
The Case For, If You Want It
To be fair, and we are always fair, data centers do have their supporters. Building trade unions are among them, because the construction requires significant skilled labor, and those are real jobs. That is a legitimate point that the opponents of these facilities would do well to sit with.
On water, CBS News ran the numbers and found that golf courses nationwide use more than twice as much water as data centers. That is a genuine fact, even if it lands a little funny when the people raising the concern live in Arizona and are not big golf course fans either.
Webber also made the national security case plainly: there is an AI arms race, the United States wants to win it before, as he put it, "a bad actor, say, China," and data centers are how that race gets run. That argument will resonate with some people and sound like a blank check for corporate interests to others. Both reactions are understandable.
Greg Abbott Wanted This, For the Record
Texas did not stumble into becoming a data center hub. Republican Governor Greg Abbott actively recruited big tech to the state, pitching Texas as a low-regulation, business-friendly destination. He got what he wanted. Whether the residents of Red Oak wanted the same thing is a question that apparently did not come up during the sales pitch.
This is the part that tends to get lost in the national conversation about AI investment and innovation. The benefits, the tax revenues, the ribbon-cuttings, those accrue at the state and corporate level. The costs, the noise, the traffic, the power bills, the water pressure, those land in specific neighborhoods with specific people who had no seat at the table when the deal was struck.
Villegas put it plainly to CBS News: the council made decisions without transparency and got caught. In a functioning democratic system, that would be the end of the story. In Red Oak, Texas in 2026, it was apparently just the beginning of the construction.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that what is happening in Red Oak, and Loudoun County, and Chandler, and everywhere else these facilities are being dropped like stones into quiet communities, is the price of progress. That the discomfort is temporary, the benefits universal, and anyone raising concerns is just a luddite who does not understand the future. That is the story the industry wants told.
The actual story is simpler and uglier. Companies with more money than most countries are building industrial facilities that consume extraordinary amounts of power and water, in communities that were not consulted, approved by local governments that were apparently persuaded through processes that residents describe as secretive, in service of an AI arms race that will enrich a very small number of people enormously. The residents asking questions are not anti-technology. They are pro-accountability. There is a difference.
When a Marine veteran standing in front of her neighbors can get unanimous agreement from a room full of Texans and still lose the vote, something is broken. Not in the technology. In who the technology is actually being built for.
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