FILE – A worker prepares a plot of land for an AI data center, with a retired power plant being refurbished to provide electricity for the facility in the distance, March 24, 2026, in Independence, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) Big Tech is spending billions to construct AI data centers across the country, putting blue-collar tradespeople in a deeply weird position: they are making the best money of their lives building the very machines meant to replace them. Electricians are scoring five-figure monthly paychecks to wire up these massive facilities. Meta and Google are even setting up trade academies to build their new megaprojects.
Some might say this is a cause for celebration, but it isn’t that simple. A growing number of workers are starting to feel a deep sense of unease, and for good reason. They’re beginning to realize they are acting as the ultimate corporate sellouts, all to enrich a handful of tech lords who would trade them for a line of code tomorrow morning.
That is the brutal irony of the AI data center boom. The labor required to build them is purely temporary, but the goal of the machine inside is entirely permanent. This isn’t like the old tech transitions where a new factory replaced an old assembly line. Meta, Google and Amazon didn’t exactly treat us like royalty during the Web 2.0 era. They harvested our personal lives, monetized our attention spans, and turned the internet into an algorithm-driven strip mall.
But AI is a completely different beast. It isn’t just about making processes faster; the technology is designed to take over the work entirely. Once those temporary construction crews pack up their tools and head home, they leave behind an automated ghost town run by a skeleton crew of 50 people. The machines take over, systematically learning how to automate the next tier of human labor, including the specialized engineering and programming that built them.
Beyond the labor trap, these data centers are genuine environmental monstrosities wearing down local communities. Far from being invisible digital networks, these massive, windowless concrete buildings heavily drain local resources. We are talking about facilities that require billions of gallons of water just to keep their servers from melting, often in arid states already facing severe droughts. Worse, they act as a parasitic drain on the public power grid. When a single tech campus can swallow more juice than a mid-sized American city, it doesn’t take an electrical engineer to figure out what happens next. Old coal plants are resurrected, carbon goals are abandoned, and local energy bills skyrocket. Power outages become a summer tradition. In fact, America is expected to experience 100 times as many blackouts by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens are stuck subsidizing the massive infrastructure costs of multi-trillion-dollar corporations.
Enter the tech utopians and the billionaire class to explain why we should all just smile and accept the pain. Chief among them is “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary, who is heavily invested in this multi-billion-dollar data center gold rush, most notably pitching a 10,000-acre project out in Utah. To put that in perspective, a site that size covers the equivalent of thousands upon thousands of football fields.
This colossal layout represents a staggering consumption of high-quality land and scarce Western water. When pressed by critics like Tucker Carlson on why ordinary taxpayers should hand over corporate welfare and tax breaks to billionaires building private infrastructure, the response is always the same tired geopolitical boogeyman: “If we don’t build them, China will.”
O’Leary has gone so far as to publicly imply that local environmental groups and American citizens protesting these data centers are practically operating as Chinese state agitators. Given that 70 percent of Americans oppose these projects, it’s absurd to claim that many people are being influenced by shadowy forces.
We are told this is a binary choice. Either Americans hand over their water, power grids, and hard-earned cash to domestic tech monopolies, or the country faces total subjugation by Beijing’s algorithms. The message is simple: be patriotic, or learn Mandarin.
It’s a classic false choice designed to keep the money flowing. Whether a digital panopticon is managed by a bureaucrat in Guangdong or a tech executive in Silicon Valley makes very little difference to the American citizen whose local river just dried up and whose utility bills doubled.
The tech utopians want you to believe that resisting this massive infrastructure buildout is tantamount to economic suicide. In reality, funding these monstrosities is the real scam. Americans are being asked to help build the very things designed to replace them, while draining natural reservoirs and financing their own economic obsolescence — all to boost corporate stock prices.
John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.
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