America’s data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk
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Business | Do not compute<br>America’s data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk<br>Opposition is spreading across the country<br>Share
Illustration: Janne Iivonen
Jun 23rd 2026|New Albany, Ohio|10 min read
FROM THE top of the slide, which curves into a little backyard pool, the view as recently as April would have been of lush Ohio farmland, dense forest and pretty clapboard houses. Now it is of six giant weatherproof tents of the type more commonly used by the military to house fighter jets or by aid organisers in disaster zones. These will soon contain perhaps $30bn-worth of cutting-edge semiconductors. Along with a clutch of gas turbines to provide power, they occupy a site the size of an airport terminal. If Meta, the site’s owner, stays on track to bring its “Prometheus” data centre online in 2026, it will dedicate an entire gigawatt (GW) of power—the amount needed to power as many as 1m homes, or roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor—to artificial intelligence.
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