America’s data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk

The mammoth data centres of the future, capable of training frontier ai models in 2030, will not be in the urban clusters in Virginia or California that house most of America’s server farms today, but in the emerging “Silicon Heartland” of Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, or in southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Vast sums—as much as $750bn by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, plus billions more by various others—are being ploughed into investments in these places. An estimated $3trn will go into AI data centres globally between 2026 and 2030. Much of that is earmarked for America….