Data centers are becoming political objects.

Not because the tech's controversial, but because they take resources locals already feel short on.

A hyperscale build isn’t “just capex.”

It's permits.
Water.
Diesel backup rules.
Neighborhoods noticing that the new skyline is cooling towers and substations.

Once something gets that big, you’re not competing on engineering. You’re competing on legitimacy.

Data centers change communities... that’s what people don't think about enough when it comes to AI.

We keep talking like chips are the bottleneck because it’s easier to think in factories and supply chains.

But the more central changes are civic: what a region will tolerate, approve, and energize on a timeline that doesn’t care about your next model release.

Distributed capacity behaves differently.
There’s no single site to rally around.
Workloads can move.
Failures stay local.

And it can feed off what already exists: idle GPUs, underused halls, “boring” capacity that politics can’t really stop because it’s not a new permit… it’s just there.

So yeah, compute is turning into a grid problem, not a cloud problem.

The winners won’t just lock up silicon... they'll lock up routable, geographically flexible throughput.