Public Land, Private AI Empires
Updated
A new structure is popping up across the United States, and most of us have never heard the name of it. The massive compound is called a frontier AI data center, a term coined as a legal category by the Biden administration in January 2025, and it represents nothing less than an unprecedented computer empire. A typical data center is the warehouse of the internet, with rows and rows of computers that store emails and photos, and stream movies. A frontier AI data center is much bigger, hungrier, and has a life of its own. Specifically, it is a fortress of specialized chips built solely to train the most powerful AI systems in existence. One frontier AI data center consumes as much electricity as a mid-sized city, while it drinks millions of gallons of water to cool its processors. These structures do not care about “climate change” or pleasing the neighbors. No, indeed, they are among the most resource-intensive structures ever built.
Not surprisingly, America has more of the typical data centers than any other nation. Of the roughly 12,000 data centers on Earth, the US holds close to half of them, more than the next 14 countries combined, with the densest concentration on the planet being in Northern Virginia. Again, most of these are ordinary facilities. But the frontier AI centers, the giant, power-hungry kind that are rapidly advancing to perform what feels like a “takeover,” are the fastest-growing and most resource-intensive part of that total, and the mad dash to build them is where the money and the land are now flowing. Pay attention.
The next obvious question is: who pays for all this? Overwhelmingly, private capital from the world’s largest Big Tech companies- that’s who. No real surprise there. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are on track to spend over a trillion dollars on this infrastructure by 2027, and Elon Musk’s xAI has already built one of the largest facilities on the planet, a complex in Memphis called Colossus, in a matter of months. Increasingly, financing also comes from foreign governments. The oil-rich monarchies of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, through the massive state-owned investment funds they use to spend their petroleum wealth abroad, have taken stakes in the American companies presently building this technology. The Emirati fund MGX holds positions in OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund poured $3 billion into xAI alone. Plainly put, the AI tools that millions of Americans now use every day are partly financed by governments in the Persian Gulf.
And, as we discuss these massive empires, it is a much smaller world than one would expect. The true frontier AI facilities (again, the ones training the most advanced AI models) number in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. Epoch AI, an independent tracker, follows 74 of these compounds worldwide—most on American soil—and found that the ten largest on Earth are in the US. But it is not just the buildings that are concentrated in America. Five companies, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, now control roughly 70% of all AI computing on the planet, the raw processing capacity that every AI system needs to operate. Nearly everyone else in the field, including well-known companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, rents access from them. No, this is not a broad and open industry. It is a handful of Big Tech overlords holding the machinery of the future—or, put better, the future in general—in their hands.
Concerningly, one part of the unfolding potential horror story is getting the least attention. The federal government is opening public land to these private companies so they can build even more AI data centers.
On January 14, 2025, in the final days of his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order titled “Executive Order on Advancing United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure.” The order created a program to lease federal land and sites belonging to the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the Department of the Interior to private companies to construct frontier AI data centers. The order directed agencies to identify sites, hand them to developers, and to then get the facilities running by the end of 2027. And even though this was a Biden initiative, the current administration has continued and expanded it, with the Department of Energy formally soliciting private industry to put AI infrastructure on our nation’s lands. In other words, both Biden and Trump agreed that public land should be converted to private real estate to advance AI.
When reading the fine print of the original executive order, it gets even worse than that. The private companies get to lease and use federal land, and the government commits to speeding up the permitting process and shortening the environmental review. What? These are the safeguards that normally let a community weigh in before a power-hungry industrial site takes over next door. Yes, the developers bear the construction costs, but in exchange, they receive public land, a fast track through the rules that govern the rest of us, and the right to build the single most valuable asset in today’s technology-obsessed economy on precious land that belongs to all American taxpayers.
To those pushing the AI trajectory forward, this is a splendid idea. Indeed, much of the influential analysis urging Americans to build more of these AI data centers, including the widely cited Brookings paper warning us that we must keep this infrastructure on friendly soil, was produced with funding from Google.org, the charitable arm of Google—one of the Big Tech companies racing to build data centers. Here we are again, same story, different subject. The think tank makes the case for the buildout, and the company that profits from it signs the check. If that pattern feels familiar, it should. We see it in literally every industry that has found a way to launder its self-interest through respectable-looking institutions.
Meanwhile, there is some good news. People who actually live near these sites are fighting back, and guess what? It is working. Across the country, residents have organized against proposed data centers, fiercely objecting to the toll they take on the local power grid and water supply, while returning very little to the community except higher electric bills. That community resistance has teeth. Indeed, despite the billions pouring in, surprisingly few of the planned centers have broken ground, as town after town delays, blocks, or rejects them. And the operators of the ones that do get built are bracing for the same community anger. Their response is almost too fitting. Data centers have started deploying robotic guard dogs to patrol the perimeters of finished campuses. So here we are. We have arrived at a scene out of a science fiction movie. Sprawling private compounds, built on public land, drawing power and water from the surrounding towns, and AI robotic dogs guard the empire against the citizens who live there.
And this is the trade being made on behalf of the American people, with no meaningful conversation about it. A handful of self-serving trillion-dollar corporations, some backed by foreign money, are assembling the most powerful machine empires in human history, which are intended to run humanity. These empires are being built on land that belongs to the public. They are using power and water that our existence depends upon. And they are fencing it all off behind robotic guard dogs. And the US is now leaning on it. Yep, roughly half of America’s economic growth early this year came from the data center building spree, which means an economy that might otherwise be limping along at one percent is being held up by a handful of Big Tech empires laying their AI infrastructure. The empires that own the future are being handed the ground on which to build without having to pay for it. All at the expense of the American people.