Trump warns towns without data centers will be 'backwards and poor' as Gary, Indiana already sits without power

As it ran on the front

The administration's position on data centers is 'Let Data Reign,' a phrase officials are standing firmly behind, and communities that block this critical technology risk becoming backwards and poor — those are the words used, and this desk is not here to relitigate the phrasing, only to explain the policy, which is that the infrastructure of the future requires — requires local communities to accept siting decisions they, in most cases, weren't asked to vote on. Not that anyone's being forced, exactly. Nobody's forced. It's more that the alternative, according to the administration, is regional backwardness, which is a choice communities are free to make, the wrong choice, but a choice.

Now, is it fair to point to Gary, Indiana, weeks into a power outage, and ask where the reliable grid is for the communities that already said yes to industrial infrastructure? That's — that's actually a fair question, and this desk would like to walk that framing back slightly. What this desk meant to say is that data center buildout and grid reliability are two entirely separate policy tracks, unrelated, no shared — well, they share a power grid, technically, that part's true, data centers do draw enormous load off the same regional grids that towns like Gary depend on for the lights to stay on, that's just physics, this desk isn't disputing physics.…