Data centers are good for local communities

Large computing facilities built to train and run artificial intelligence models, and the public questions they raise about electricity, water and land. Fought locally through zoning and utility rates, and nationally through energy policy, grid capacity and federal support for the industry.

Physical facilities housing servers, storage, and networking equipment that form the backbone of the internet and modern digital infrastructure.

The 2026 public and political fight over AI data centers in the US, from who pays for them and who benefits to whether the country should build them at all, which has become a major issue in the midterm elections and led OpenAI to start calling its data centers compute campuses.