Like Russia's efforts to aid Donald Trump in 2016, it's hard to tell how much actual impact the propaganda is actually having on the outcome. There are many, many legitimate reasons to oppose data centers, from the local nuisance they create to the energy they consume to their contribution to an already critical level of global warming.

But I think the most damning argument against them is that they aren't needed. The cost of serving models is dropping faster than data centers can be built, and that trend seems likely to continue---AI is such a new technology that we have barely scraped the surface in finding efficiencies. And most of the innovations in efficiency that have emerged have come from the smaller players, because the big AI labs believe they can simply scale their way out of capacity constraints. An increasingly troubling trend is that they are not scaling their way out with cash flow, but with massive amounts of borrowed money. Seen in that light, data centers are not only a physical liability, they could become a catastrophic economic liability.