Right now, massive AI data centers are gobbling up rural land, uprooting the farms and ranches that could guarantee America’s food sovereignty.
This Big Tech land-grab is often rationalized with a number of defenses: beating China in the AI race, creating rural jobs and economic growth, and advancing technology and national security.
But Daniel Horowitz insists that we’re being lied to.
“We’re being told that we need to gobble up all of our land — by the way, often with foreign investors — because somehow that is the only way to excel at artificial intelligence,” he says.
But “the surest way of achieving this dystopian nightmare of this techno-feudalism, where we own nothing, is to take the scarcest and most precious resource of land from its decentralized control of American households, homesteaders, ranchers, farmers, small businesses, and centralizing it behind the global tech moguls.”
On this episode of “Conservative Review,” Horowitz, alongside CEO of Fractal Web and AI software expert Michael Cation, dismantles the AI data center advocates’ three biggest arguments.
– YouTube
1. The China argument
According to the data center advocates, America must build massive, hyperscale data centers — and sacrifice rural land and power for them — to achieve AI dominance and beat China in the global race.
But Horowitz calls this a “false choice.”
They argue that this is “the only way of achieving dominance in AI, when in fact, you’re actually going to go backwards and misallocate resources away from what is an auspicious use of AI,” he says.
Further, in trying so hard to build these hyperscale data centers to beat China in the AI race, America is rezoning and handing over huge amounts of rural farmland and power infrastructure to massive corporate developers — many of them foreign-owned. Horowitz points to President Trump recently floating the idea of allowing China to invest $1 trillion in U.S. land and factories.
“We need that to beat China, but then somehow we’re just going to have China own more American infrastructure and land at a time where I thought we all wanted to ban that,” he says, calling it “hypocrisy.”
2. The rural jobs/economic growth argument
Another argument claims that building giant data centers in rural areas will bring thousands of construction and operational jobs, generate big tax revenue, attract more businesses, and deliver much-needed economic growth and prosperity to struggling small towns.
Horowitz condemns this argument as a scam, claiming that these massive centers will only deliver mostly temporary, low-quality construction work performed by imported or illegal labor, destroy productive farmland, spike local crime, and provide almost no lasting economic benefit to actual residents.
“Laramie County Planning Commission is planning an 800-unit man camp that could house up to 5,600 workers, which is more than most towns in Wyoming, and we all know who monopolizes those jobs: a bunch of illegal aliens,” he says.
Citing an article from Wyoming’s Cowboy State Daily outlet, he reads, “Man camps in similar locations have led to an increase in property crime, DUIs, drug crimes, and violent crimes.”
3. The advancing technology and national security argument
Another argument perpetuated by the data center advocates contends that massive, hyperscale data centers are essential for advancing cutting-edge AI technology and protecting national security because only these giant centralized facilities can provide the enormous computing power, massive data processing, and rapid innovation needed to stay ahead of rivals like China in critical areas like defense, intelligence, and technological superiority.
Again, Horowitz throws the red flag. He and Cation dispute this claim by arguing that giant centralized data centers are actually a national security liability and the wrong path for real technological progress.
“AI is not all about cloud-based LLMs for data centers. … With edge computing, you could actually do so much more on local servers, local devices,” says Horowitz.
He points to Israel’s Iron Dome as an example. It’s a highly effective defense system that relies on localized edge computing — fast, on-site AI processing in distributed batteries — rather than depending on giant, vulnerable centralized data centers.
If it did rely on massive data centers, it would “a huge security” risk, especially in Israel’s ongoing war with Iran, he argues.
Cation, an expert in computing infrastructure, drives home the national security point with this powerful rebuttal: “In the defense world … large data centers [are] called high-value targets. … The thing that can’t be destroyed are distributed systems.”
Together, they argue that the real future of secure and effective AI lies in edge computing, narrow AI, and fractal computing — decentralized systems that are faster, cheaper, more resilient, and far less vulnerable than massive, centralized data centers.
To hear more, watch the episode above.
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