The Age of Artificial Intelligence is Upon Us.

An Industrial Revolution times 10.

The coming changes carry profound spiritual and cultural implications,

but I recently looked into how that revolution is also transforming our physical environment.

All that data we used doesn't just live in digital reality.

It lives in data centers. These centers are springing up right where we live, next to our homes,

our schools, and our parks. And it turns out we hate it. Across the country, proposals for new AI data centers are beginning to trigger zoning

battles, public hearings, and community protests.

To date, a growing wave of local and often bipartisan opposition to data centers has blocked

over $64 billion in planned projects.

93% of Americans support data center construction, but only 35% say they would vote yes to a center in their hometown if a vote were to be held. Everyone agrees, not in my backyard.

So why the unified resistance? I wanted to understand the anger and controversy that AI data

centers have stirred up in Americans from Arizona to Iowa to Virginia.

What I found was a vast physical footprint of an inhuman scale set to expand exponentially

in the next decade and consume vast quantities of energy, land, and water as it grows. The AI revolution isn't just coming for our minds.

It's already eating up our land and resources.

The question is, is your backyard next?

Before the 1990s, every office in America had a data center.

It was called a computer closet.

But as the dot-com boom took off, companies increasingly outsourced data location to third-party data centers.

In the cloud computing era, platforms shifted the market toward

massive, scalable facilities. Today's hyperscale data centers house rows of computer servers,

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