The Layman’s Case for Data Centers

Politicians should always follow what their constituents want. It’s what our founding fathers intended: that Americans are guaranteed to live in a society that they create. I say all this upfront because this essay is a case for data centers that I believe isn’t talked about enough - from a layman’s point of view.

I am not a technologist. Let me get that out of the way before I make this argument, given how often the social media legends attempt to falsely label me. Put shortly, I am a total non-technical layman. I grew up in a middle class family in the suburbs of New York City, in a town that was built up after World War Two and has mostly stayed exactly the same since. I grew up rejecting technology, opting out of social media as my earliest form of rebellion. That still largely holds true today. I prefer analog, classic, and tradition. Even with the option to attend university, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, partly because traditionally, that’s what men do when they come of age. Today I drive a carbureted 1985 Ford Ranger because I don’t want a computer in my car. I am a simple man.

I was approached by the American Dynamism team at a16z to help invest in technology that, in their words, would “advance our nation’s interest.” At the time, I was in a classical hand drafting architecture course, believing the best structure is the one drawn by hand and perfected 1000 years ago. I was skeptical, but with some convincing from trusted mentors, I agreed to meet with them where they explained their mission to revitalize and reindustrialize America. As an outsider to Silicon Valley, I didn’t even know what venture capital was, and I was hesitant to believe their motives. But their conviction was real and it was hard to deny.

In the year and a half I’ve been contributing to these efforts, I’ve developed a perspective I think is rare: an outsider who has been on the inside.

Bring the Factory Back

Every American knows we scarcely manufacture anything here anymore. Classic American cities sit largely abandoned because globalism convinced corporations to sell out Americans for higher margins. This infuriates me, and it should infuriate every American. It’s also one of my favorite efforts to work on at a16z. I always try to buy American made goods: my Ford truck, my 1970 Bulova analog watch with its case made in Sag Harbor, my Alden shoes made in New England. I’ll go out of my way and pay a premium to support Americans. I shouldn’t have to, though. It should be the default option. China undercut American businesses through slave labor and automation, and we Americans accepted the tradeoff: American craftsmanship and pride of work for cheap junk.

The American Dynamism team backs companies like Hadrian and AMCA that are bringing manufacturing back. To do it, they use advanced software and automate using robotic systems to be price competitive. And those robotic systems have to be trained to accomplish a task. Teaching a robot to see and think takes enormous computing power. You feed the model millions of examples of video and practice runs, and crunching all of that happens in a data center. Now, roboticist are building one big general purpose robot brain instead of small task specific ones, which takes even more computing than before.

Before a robot ever runs in the real world, you test it in a fake one. Companies run thousands of video game style practice worlds where the robot can crash, fail, and learn without breaking anything. All those pretend worlds run on data center computers too.

Then once robots are out in the field, they act like scouts. Everything they see and every mistake they make gets sent home, sorted through, and used to teach the next version of the brain, which gets pushed back out to the whole fleet. Every robot benefits from what any one robot learns.

Now, one may argue: so what? We reindustrialize America and robots take our jobs?

First, the manufacturing wasn’t being done in America to begin with, so there were no American jobs to take. Second, more American jobs get created to build the factories, oversee the operations, and aid in the manufacturing itself.

Take Hadrian as an example: Their machines run on software, their production is directed by AI, and their whole thesis is that automation is the only way America can compete on price with China. By the logic of the “robots take our jobs” crowd, Hadrian should employ almost nobody. Instead, they employ hundreds of Americans across three factories, and this January they cut the ribbon on their third, a 290,000 square foot plant in Mesa, Arizona, a two hundred million dollar investment bringing over 350 new jobs to a single community. Their founder says the mission is to make manufacturing meaningful work again. Every one of those positions exists because the automation exists, not in spite of it. The robot did not take an American’s job. The robot made the factory cheap enough to build in America, and the factory is what hires Americans.

And none of it runs without data centers. The AI directing those machines, the software training those new hires, the systems that let a factory stand up in months instead of years, all of it is computed somewhere. You can’t do any of this without data centers.

Building Purpose

I believe data centers will help solve three problems nobody thinks to connect: an economy that stopped making things, the rot in higher education, and the loneliness of American men. They are one problem wearing three masks, and to see it you have to go back to 1965.

That year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Higher Education Act as part of the Great Society. The government would guarantee student loans, backing the banks against default and subsidizing the interest. A good act in principle. But colleges learned they could charge higher and higher prices, knowing every student walked in the door with a guaranteed loan. Higher education became too accessible, the degree got diluted, and the economy had to manufacture an oversaturation of office jobs to absorb all the graduates. That model built an economy that relied on globalization because most of the workforce now sat in offices instead of standing in factories.

The trades paid the price. When the factories left, the work that fed them left too, and a culture built around the diploma taught young men that working with your hands was what you did if you couldn’t do better. I felt the weight of it on a recent visit to shipbuilding sites in New Orleans. The yards were a shadow of what American shipbuilding once was. The patriarch of my family, Captain John Penny, sailed to Long Island in the 1650s, and the Penny’s established themselves as generations of shipwrights and carpenters, eventually moving to Brooklyn to build the first steel hulls for the Civil War in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Maybe I was destined to do the same. Instead I work an office job.

That is the trap young American men are in. They are pushed toward college and the office because the trades will not pay them enough to build a life, and most men do not belong in an office. They want to work with their hands, build something physical, use their bodies, and belong to a crew with a mission. I experienced this to the highest degree in the Marine Corps. In the most intense suffering and the most physical grandeur, I felt the most joy I have ever known, and I felt it with my brothers in arms. Most men never touch that primitive need, and the loneliness statistics prove it.

So how do data centers fix any of this? Artificial intelligence is coming for the office jobs. That is a fact, and it is coming whether we manage it or not. We have two possible futures ahead of us.

The first course: The government removes subsidized student loans and lets the weak colleges face the market. Many will go out of business as collateral. And now the data center stops being the villain of this story and becomes the engine of it. The buildout is the largest source of blue collar demand in America. Construction spending on data centers crossed a fifty billion dollar annual rate this spring. A single large facility pulls up to fifteen hundred workers at peak, and electrical work alone is roughly half the job. The industry says it needs more than three hundred thousand new electricians for the AI buildout while a third of the union electricians we have are near retirement, and Microsoft’s president has called the electrician shortage the single biggest obstacle to expansion. Electricians on data center campuses in Northern Virginia are clearing six figures without student debt, paid to learn, and a decade of guaranteed demand. That kind of demand does what no government program can: it makes the trades pay again. American men get to do the work that actually fulfills them, in an environment that encourages masculinity rather than suppresses it. This wouldn’t be the first time. At the bottom of the Great Depression, with a quarter of the country out of work, America framed the Empire State Building in thirteen months, 3,400 men on site a day. The data center campus is this generation’s version of that decision to build.

The second course is what happens if the government does not step in. AI takes the office jobs anyway, because the data centers get built anyway, and millions of men are unfortunately left unemployed with degrees that mean nothing and debts they cannot pay. History is not gentle about what large numbers of idle young men with nothing to lose do to a country. The data center is not the thing taking American jobs. It is the thing offering them back. The only question is whether our policy lets American men take the offer.

A Warning to the Titans of Industry

There are actions the data center builders must take to show their appreciation for the society they are helping to build. Take a page from Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. They commissioned beautiful, classically built public works, thousands of libraries, concert halls, museums, and left a legacy of advancing our civilization and respecting the people who contributed to it. A century later we still walk through their buildings and say their names.

If you drop a monstrosity in the middle of a community, a windowless box that ruins property values and hums through the night, you will be protested at every step, and you will deserve it. What you build is a direct reflection of what you think of the people you build it among. A box designed strictly by margins tells a town you hold it in contempt. But build something beautiful, a structure worthy of the leap in civilization these machines make possible, and you will be hailed as Carnegie is hailed, for hundreds of years.

The great industrialists understood the factory, the rail station, the library were not just infrastructure. They were a declaration, made in brick and stone, that the future was worth believing in while also honoring the past. Do not sacrifice beauty for margin. The builders of the Empire State Building didn’t, and they had every excuse: they raised an Art Deco landmark at the bottom of the Depression, ahead of schedule and under budget.

Conclusion

I opened this essay with a simple truth: politicians should follow what their constituents want. So let me finish by speaking as a constituent, because that is what I am. Not a technologist, not a Silicon Valley native. A Marine from Long Island who drives a carbureted truck and had to be talked into this industry.

I am telling you the data center is not the enemy. It is the forge. It trains the robots that will bring manufacturing home. It automates the office jobs we never should have manufactured in the first place, and starves the diploma mills that manufactured them. It creates more demand for electricians, welders, and pipefitters than this country has seen in generations, the exact work American men have been locked out of for a generation. Build the data centers and you will get paychecks, purpose, and pride back in the hands of the people who want to rebuild this country.

The data center is not the thing taking American jobs. It is the thing offering them back. Every American, from the politician to the protester to the titan writing the checks, should make sure we are able to take the offer.

My allegiance is with the United States of America, and I want what’s best for her not just this decade but for the next thousand years. I believe that data centers are how we win.

God Bless America