Angela Hall did everything America tells you to do. She climbed out of public housing, saved for years, and bought a rural Georgia property she planned to leave to her granddaughter. She now has a few weeks to pack. Georgia Power wants the land for transmission lines feeding the AI data centers swallowing the region, and eminent domain makes the conversation short. The Daily Mail told her story this week. Her daughter Ansley Brown described the feeling that a billion-dollar corporation had reached into a rural county and rewritten her mother's future on company stationery.
This is the unglamorous shape of the AI revolution. Not obsequious chatbots. Bulldozers, transmission corridors, and legal notices delivered to people treated as collateral damage in someone else's gold rush.
On Monday, May 18, Representative Nancy Mace called for a one-year moratorium on new data center construction in South Carolina. Her framing was direct. South Carolina, she said, is not Big Tech's personal power grid. Families and small businesses are watching their utility bills bend upward to subsidize server farms owned by companies that could comfortably pay their own way but choose not to. Mace also pointed across the state line at Georgia and warned that South Carolinians shouldn't become the next Angela Hall. She’s right.
Wholesale power costs in PJM, the largest US electricity market, climbed roughly 75 percent over the past year, propelled largely by data center demand. A single planned facility in Utah, the one Kevin O'Leary is shepherding, would consume more electricity than the entire state currently generates. Lake Tahoe is losing power capacity to data centers serving customers who’ll never visit. The technology promoted as weightless and ethereal turns out to need rivers, rare earths, and other people's neighborhoods.
Tucker Carlson sat down with O'Leary last week and asked a question that should’ve been simple. If AI is the most profitable industry in human history, why are Americans asked to underwrite the power lines, tax breaks, and the eminent domain takings? O'Leary's answer was a small masterpiece of misdirection. He switched to China. Would you rather, he asked, that American developers put down their shovels while Beijing accelerates?
Pay attention to the move. A homeowner in Georgia loses her land. A retiree in South Carolina opens a higher power bill. A worker wonders whether the server farm rising behind the tree line is what will eventually replace him. And the answer from the billionaire is that questioning any of this makes you, somehow, an asset of the Chinese Communist Party. O'Leary even suggested that opponents of his Utah project were funded by or sympathetic to China. The patriotism is doing a lot of work here. It’s changing the subject.
The structure of the argument deserves a name. Call it the flag-wrapped subsidy. The private sector gets the profits. The public sector gets the bill. Anyone who notices is accused of treason. It’s a clever closed loop, and survives only as long as nobody directly challenges it.
Carlson, to his credit, challenged it. He pointed out that O'Leary's Utah project will be funded in part by Americans who receive no equity, dividends and no thank-you note. He asked O'Leary to name a single industry AI will create to replace the ones it eliminates. Mr. Wonderful couldn’t.
The pollution piece often gets buried under the financial story; it shouldn’t. These facilities consume staggering volumes of water in drought-prone regions. They run diesel backup generators that poison the air around schools and subdivisions. They radiate heat. They operate at frequencies that ruin sleep for miles. Residents near existing sites in Virginia and Texas describe a low mechanical drone that never lifts. The phrase the industry prefers is hyperscale. The phrase the neighbors use is unprintable.
None of this is an argument against artificial intelligence. AI is coming for us all, like it or not. Rather, it's an argument against handing the costs to people who’ll see none of the upside. Mace's moratorium is modest. Twelve months to write rules requiring data centers to fund the grid upgrades they trigger. Twelve months to stop the Angela Hall pipeline before it runs through another county. If the industry is as inevitable and lucrative as its boosters insist, 12 months will not break it.