Bipartisanship Returns As Everyone Agrees The Data Center Should Be Somewhere Else

WASHINGTON—America has rediscovered bipartisan cooperation by placing an artificial intelligence data center beside a town and asking residents whether they would prefer it beside a different town.

In Murdock, Nebraska, conservative farmers and members of the Sierra Club filled a local firehouse to discuss plans that could convert more than 1,300 acres into a computing complex with its own natural gas plant. Similar alliances are forming around the country as voters compare promised jobs and tax revenue with electricity demand, water use, noise, and the continued availability of farmland.

A July Fox News poll found that most registered voters opposed having a data center built in their area, including 60 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of MAGA voters. The technology has therefore achieved something years of congressional retreats could not: a majority coalition assembled around a specific piece of infrastructure, provided the infrastructure is moved elsewhere.

President Donald Trump remains a supporter. He has said data centers bring jobs, money, and lower taxes, while his administration has encouraged participating companies to build or purchase their own power generation and cover the supporting infrastructure. This allows communities to welcome the computing facility, its electrical plant, and the transmission equipment as one convenient package.

The coalition does not agree on climate policy, labor, or the proper direction of the country. It agrees that the next phase of American innovation should proceed at full speed from a ZIP code that belongs to somebody else.