Let’s talk about the farmland.
There’s this moment from July. A protest in Lubbock, Texas, about data centers. The state’s agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, gets on the microphone and says the line that should be on a billboard. Developers are taking up our very best farmland, he says, and they give sometimes ten times the value — so it’s hard for farmers to turn that down.
Ten times.
Sit with that for a second. That’s not a negotiation. That’s an offer built so the answer is already yes.
Because here’s what happened while everyone was arguing about tokens and GPUs and which model wins. The real scarcity moved. It left the software and went into the ground. Compute was never a cloud. It’s dirt, it’s water, it’s power lines, and there is a finite amount of all three.
Land purchases in the US for future data centers hit about six billion dollars in the first half of 2026. Up seventy-nine percent from the year before, according to the commercial real estate firm Avison Young. And data centers weren’t a niche anymore. They were twenty-seven percent of all US development sites this year. Second only to apartment buildings. Ahead of offices, retail, industrial parks, everything else we used to think of as the shape of a town.
Meta’s Hyperion campus in rural Louisiana tells you the scale better than any chart. It was originally planned at two thousand two hundred and fifty acres. It’s now thirty-six hundred and fifty. That’s twice the size of the state’s international airport.
Picture that. Not a building. A landmass.
Now the part that most people haven’t priced in. The bill.
There’s a man in Manassas, Virginia — John Steinbach, lived in the same house almost forty years. January 2026, his electricity bill came in at two hundred and eighty-one dollars. The month before it was about a hundred. He’s sitting there holding a number he’s never seen, in a house that hasn’t changed, wondering what happened. And a Bloomberg analysis found that in areas with a high concentration of data centers, electricity prices jumped two hundred and sixty-seven percent over five years.
But hold on. Because the honest version of this story has two sides, and you should hear both.
Rutgers’ Policy Lab published work saying data centers are, quote, mostly not raising your electric bill. Yet. And there’s another study showing that, between 2019 and 2024, growth in data centers was actually associated with retail rates about six percent lower. So if you want to argue the machine is already fleecing your home bill, a careful person will push back.
And that gap — that’s the actual story. Not the numbers. The word “yet.”
Because both things can be true at once. The buildout so far has been absorbed into the general rate base, spread thin across everybody, so no single household feels the whole hit. But the question that matters hasn’t been answered. It’s being answered. Right now. In rate cases and zoning hearings and utility commission filings that almost nobody shows up to.
Who pays for the next decade of grid upgrades. The town, or the company that profits from the load. That’s the decision. Not whether AI is good. Not whether the model is smarter than last quarter. Just: when the transformer needs replacing because a hyperscaler moved in next door, whose line item is that?
Here’s the pattern, and it’s not new. It’s the oldest one there is. Socialize the cost, privatize the upside. The road gets built with public money and the toll goes to the operator. Ratepayers fund the infrastructure and shareholders get the compute. It happened with rail, with broadband, with the last four tech cycles. Nobody’s being evil here. The incentives just make it inevitable — a utility that can pass costs to everyone has no reason to fight a customer who will pay whatever it takes to build. A farmer facing ten times the value of his land has no real choice at all. A town facing a tax break and a promise of jobs has already been out-negotiated before the meeting starts.
And it doesn’t stop at your power bill. Consumer Reports noted that the same buildout is scooping up RAM, which pushes up the price of the laptop you were going to buy. So it hits you twice. Once at the wall socket, once at the checkout.
Now the operator lesson, because this is the one you can actually use.
If you run a business on top of AI, you’ve probably got a line in your budget that says tokens, and subscriptions, and API calls. And you probably feel quite good about it, because the inference prices keep falling and it looks like the cost curve is going your way.
That’s the software line. It’s not the cost curve.
The real cost curve is energy, water, land, and the politics of where they sit. Those don’t appear on any invoice you receive. That doesn’t mean they’re free. It means somebody else is holding the bill, and one day that somebody is going to hand it to you. Ask the question every serious operator should be asking in 2026: what happens to my business the week the power gets expensive, or a regulator decides data centers pay their own way, or the state I’m depending on says no more? If you’ve built on top of a supply you don’t control and can’t price, you didn’t just integrate AI. You moved your lock-in off the model and onto the grid. And the grid doesn’t do export buttons.
There’s a bigger thing under all of this, and I’ll say it plainly.
We’ve spent two years arguing about consent in the digital layer — who can train on your data, who can clone your voice, who can remember your life. All of that matters. But consent has to extend past the screen. Into the physical world. Because a person can genuinely agree to use a tool and still never have agreed to pay for what it takes to run it. The farmer doesn’t consent to the data center. He consents to a number he can’t refuse. The ratepayer never got asked at all.
The machine needs something it cannot make. Land, water, power. It can generate a face, a voice, a proof. It can’t generate a river.
And the bill for all of it is being written right now, in rooms almost nobody is in. The rate case. The zoning meeting. The county board on a Tuesday night with four people in the chairs.
Show up to one. Or at least read the notice. It’s the most human thing you can do this month — because the machine will keep buying the ground, and the only people who ever stop it are the ones who were in the room.
You’ve got this.