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When American manufacturing was truly coming into its own in the early 20th century, workers sometimes labored 12-hour days seven days a week and risked life and limb working near dangerous machinery, while factories blackened the skies of American cities.
Yet some of the same people who insist that we need to reindustrialize to return to a version of those halcyon days can’t bear the thought of the construction of industrial-scale computing facilities.
They complain that data centers are unsightly and use lots of energy and water. But what do they think major factories are like?
If today’s standards applied, we almost certainly never would have built manufacturing facilities at scale.
Industrial buildings look pretty in Edward Hopper cityscapes and, say, the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex had a certain majesty. Otherwise, factories were generally closer to William Blake’s dark satanic mills than anything the average local zoning commission would want in the neighborhood.
No one ever said, “God, that smokestack looks gorgeous — I wish I lived closer to it!”
Data centers have caused outrage because they look like big warehouses, but imagine the reaction if they spewed soot over streets and houses, created slag heaps, divided neighborhoods with rail lines and other supporting infrastructure, and packed workers into nearby subpar housing.
AOC thought she had a trump card in the anti-data center case when she brandished two jars of dirty water from a house near a data center (the house’s well was perhaps disturbed during construction). That’s nothing compared to the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland repeatedly catching fire from 1868 to 1969.
These sorts of phenomena were alleviated in the postwar years. Still, even then, factories inevitably were ugly, resource-intensive and hazardous compared to other worksites.
If we can’t tolerate operations using prodigious amounts of water and energy — key inputs of the Industrial Revolution — we never could have had, for instance, integrated steel mills, sucking up an unbelievable amount of water and accounting for something like 5% of the entire country’s energy usage.
Paper mills would have been a non-starter. Aluminum smelters, the largest of which used as much electricity as a city? Forget about it. Chemical plants? Oil refineries? No way.
We hear much about the arrogance of the titans of Big Tech and how it explains opposition to data centers. How does their high-handedness compare to that of the industrial titans of yore?
Well, we haven’t witnessed any tech companies locking out the workers building their data centers, then sending in Pinkerton guards for a gun battle with the electricians and plumbers.
That would be what Carnegie Steel did during the 1892 Homestead Strike near Pittsburgh.
Now data centers don’t provide the regular employment of old-school factories. The blue-collar workforce needed to build and maintain them is substantial, though, and driving up wages in exactly the fashion everyone has long said they wanted.
It is a symptom of the perversity of the current moment that we’ve imposed huge tariffs on the rest of the world in order to — at the margins and perhaps only in theory — create more blue-collar jobs at the same time we are preparing to turn our backs on private-industry-driven investments to make such jobs more lucrative and plentiful.
If the tariffs are tinged by nostalgia, the data centers are meant to power the next wave of innovation.
One of the advantages of the mass manufacturing revolution was that it occurred at the technological and economic frontier, where large-scale productivity gains and national power are forged. The AI revolution is at the frontier now, and it should be considered a minor miracle that a phenomenon all about computing power is driving a blue-collar construction boom. What’s not to like?
We never would have become the country we are today if the response to the physical assets necessary for economic growth and good blue-collar work had been “Not in my backyard — or anywhere else.”
Rich Lowry is a nationally syndicated columnist.