America is having the wrong conversation about data centers, and if we don’t get the conversation right, we risk talking ourselves out of our own national competitiveness.
Across the country, communities are debating new projects. Questions are being raised about grid impact, water usage, land development, tax structures, and local quality of life. Those concerns aren’t just legitimate, they are essential. Local residents deserve straight talk and meaningful engagement long before heavy equipment ever rolls onto a site.
But somewhere along the line, the conversation got trapped in a false choice: economic growth versus community interests, technological progress versus responsible stewardship, saying “yes” to everything versus saying “no” to progress.
That is not the right conversation.
For more than a century, every American community has relied on four essential utilities: water, electricity, natural gas, and telecommunications. Each one transformed society. Each one faced intense local pushback. Each required massive capital investment, fierce public debate, regulatory oversight, and above all, public trust.
Today, America is building a fifth utility.
The fifth utility is the resilient digital infrastructure ecosystem, including data centers, power, cooling, connectivity, and the skilled workforce that powers modern society.
Most people rely on one or all of these utilities dozens of times a day, whether they realize it or not. Every online transaction, telehealth visit, financial transaction, emergency dispatch, cloud workload, and AI tool runs on physical infrastructure operating 24/7/365. It is time to stop treating data centers like isolated real estate projects and start recognizing them for what they actually are: critical national infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence has made this reality urgent. AI isn’t just software operating seamlessly in the cloud. AI is heavy industry. It demands dispatchable power, high-density cooling, secure supply chains, and thousands of skilled tradespeople putting steel in the dirt.
Just as previous generations built the railroads, power grids, interstate highways, and telecom lines that built the modern world, our generation is being called to build the backbone of the next American utility. The question isn’t whether this future is coming, it’s already here. The only question is whether we have the resolve to build the infrastructure required to sustain it.
That doesn’t mean giving developers a blank check, nor does it mean communities should blindly accept every proposal. Skepticism in local communities is completely understandable and healthy. Too often, corporate decisions are made for residents instead of with them. Public engagement started too late, clinical legal jargon replaced plain language conversation, and community trust was treated like a public relations exercise instead of a fundamental leadership duty.
The industry must do better. Communities deserve absolute transparency, early seat-at-the-table engagement, and honest conversations about trade-offs, land use, and long-term economic alignment. Local residents aren’t obstacles standing in the way of progress, they are our partners in shaping it.
Common ground is far closer than the noise suggests. Most people want economic opportunity, grid reliability, great jobs, and responsible environmental stewardship. They want the United States to lead the global economy, not cede key capabilities to foreign adversaries. Those goals are not mutually exclusive; they must coexist.
While we debate, the rest of the world is sprinting. Global competitors are pouring hundreds of billions into dedicated energy and AI infrastructure. American leadership will not happen automatically. It requires power. It requires supply chain integrity. And above all, it requires a disciplined, mission-ready workforce, especially the veterans and skilled tradespeople who know how to execute on the ground.
Increasingly, it requires trust. In my book, trust is a form of infrastructure itself. Without it, projects stall, costs spike, communities fracture, and nothing gets built.
The answer isn’t to build everywhere, nor is it to build nowhere. The answer is to build responsibly, transparently, intelligently, and to build relationships long before we build facilities.
The fifth utility is no longer a future concept. It is woven into the fabric of daily life and American economic strength. The question before us isn’t whether it should exist; it already does. The real question is whether we can hold a more honest, productive, and collaborative conversation about how to build it right.
THEY’RE FIREBOMBING CEOS AND SHOOTING AT LOCAL OFFICIALS. WELCOME TO THE ERA OF TECHNO-TERRORISM
If we get this right, we won’t just secure our digital future. We’ll strengthen communities. We’ll create careers that support families for generations and reinvigorate the middle class while doing it. We’ll expand American capability. And we’ll prove that the most important infrastructure required to build the future isn’t measured in megawatts, fiber miles, or square footage.
It’s measured in trust.
Kirk Offel is a Navy nuclear attack submarine veteran, host of The Data Center Revolution podcast, and the CEO of Overwatch Mission Critical, a Texas-based service-disabled veteran-owned data center company that trains and hires future leaders for high-skill jobs in the data center industry. He is a top–ranked global voice on data centers.