Ep. 902: The Pros, Cons, and Complications of Data Centers

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast, Ep. 902: "The Pros, Cons, and Complications of Data Centers"
Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Ann Davis Vaughn (energy journalist and author)
Date: July 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Steven Rinella welcomes investigative journalist Ann Davis Vaughn for a thorough exploration of the fast-growing data center industry from a natural resources perspective—focusing on the impacts to water, energy, land use, and local communities. The conversation targets the tension between economic opportunity and environmental/social costs as America experiences a new AI-driven industrial boom, and grounds the debate with ample context, historical analogies, and local stories.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is a Data Center—Really?

[04:33 - 08:00]

• Data centers, often mislabeled as "the cloud," are heavily industrial facilities that store and transmit vast amounts of digital information for society—from social media to emergency services.
• Early data centers were smaller, built near cities to ensure low-latency (fast) data transmission.
• The arrival of AI changed the game: new data centers are vastly larger, require more power, and act as "one big brain" (Ann Davis Vaughn).

Quote:
“It's one of the best marketing decisions tech has ever made for itself, to call data centers a cloud. These are really industrial complexes.”
— Ann Davis Vaughn [04:33]

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2. The Explosion of the Data Center Debate

[10:23 - 15:49]

• While environmental concerns have always existed, the issue became mainstream in late 2025/early 2026 as community after community realized the scale and pace of new builds.
• Local reactions went mainstream once giant projects began showing up outside city centers.

Quote:
“All of a sudden, there was this collective realization... these campuses started to get constructed, and people started to say, wait a minute, I didn’t know this was happening.”
— Ann Davis Vaughn [11:16]

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3. Pros & Cons of Data Centers: Why Are People Upset? What’s the Upside?

[15:05 - 21:04]

• Concerns: Water and energy consumption, higher power bills, environmental risks (heating, pollution, eyesores), secretive deals, loss of local character, fear that AI will eliminate jobs.
• Positives: Economic activity, added tax base, revitalization of communities, tech innovation, new uses for old industrial land.
• The debate is highly emotional—nostalgia for untouched landscapes, anxiety over rapid changes, feelings of powerlessness.

Quote:
“It is rational to love your community... making peace with economic decline in your region... Coming to grips with it looking completely different is, I think, very rational.”
— Ann Davis Vaughn [16:23]

• Data centers are massive: Meta’s Louisiana campus is “five miles long and one mile wide—a footprint like a municipal airport” [18:13–18:54].

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4. Water Use: Separating Sensation from Scale

[23:09 - 42:55]

• American agriculture dwarfs data centers in water usage:

  • Total US freshwater usage: ~30 trillion gallons/year
  • A single crop (e.g., corn): 3 trillion gallons/year
  • Dairy: huge water footprint (e.g., 144 gallons for a gallon of milk)
  • Lawn irrigation: 3 trillion gallons/year
  • Data centers (by 2030): ~18 billion gallons/year—orders of magnitude smaller (about 0.25% of the nation’s use).

• Data centers are becoming more water-efficient via closed-loop cooling, but indirect water use (from fossil-fueled energy production) can be significant.

• Site-specific stress: Data centers sometimes go to water-stressed regions, e.g., Colorado River Basin, Ogallala Aquifer, adding tension.

Quote:
"Direct water use of data centers has been estimated at roughly 18 billion gallons. ... 3 trillion for a single crop. U.S. data center use 18 billion. We’re talking way, way smaller.”
— Ann Davis Vaughn [39:37]

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5. Why Data Centers Go Where They Go

[47:12 - 54:05]

• Biggest factor is access to power: The grid must be able to support gigawatt-scale loads (a gigawatt is the electricity needs of a city like San Francisco).
• Other factors: available land (costs matter), fiber-optic infrastructure, state/local incentives, water access (secondary).
• Some places (like Texas, Louisiana) are attractive for available grid headroom, but can also be water-stressed.

Quote:
“A gigawatt is as much power as the whole city of San Francisco or Denver consumes... a campus that much power could be going into a single place.”
— Ann Davis Vaughn [51:30]

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6. Economic Impacts: Who Wins, Who Loses?

[57:03 - 68:51]

• Data centers bring jobs (primarily in construction, some in operations), boosts to local restaurants, hotels, and sometimes public services via taxes.
• Long-term employment is low; some feel they’re left only with the downsides (traffic, dust, landscape change).
• Local resistance (“NIMBYism”) is real—as is “land rush” speculation.

Quote:
“There are some really hard trade-offs because we all need jobs and economic activity in our community—and that is what ends up funding all of the infrastructure that makes the city livable.”
— Ann Davis Vaughn [61:48]

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7. Political Dynamics: From Blue vs Red to Bipartisan Backlash

[56:35, 63:32 - 66:09]

• Data center siting used to break along partisan lines: right-leaning states were more welcoming, but as the scale grows, resistance is increasingly bipartisan.
• Key objections now include big tech distrust, property rights, lifestyle impacts, and local economic calculations.

Quote:
“That's who's against them. Yeah, it's these two... the radical right and the radical left... they almost meet.”
— Steven Rinella & Ann Davis Vaughn [64:06–64:12]

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8. Power and the Grid: Capacity, Investment, and Innovation

[71:12 - 80:14]

• Data centers drive a massive increase in electricity demand (e.g., 25% of all power in Virginia now goes to them).
• Utilities may have “headroom” in existing grid capacity, but new generation (including nuclear, geothermal, renewables, next-gen gas) will be needed.
• Tech money is pushing grid modernization, including use of batteries, sensors, and smarter load handling.

Quote:
“We're at the beginning of more of an industrial revolution catalyzed by AI. ... We may end up just creating more energy generation to feed more applications of AI than we can imagine today.”
— Ann Davis Vaughn [80:14]

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9. Negotiating Power: Communities, Incentives, and Leverage

[85:35 - 91:49]

• Communities are learning they have significant leverage as the market for new sites heats up.
• Deals are evolving: less public giveaway, more demand for “community positive” investments (e.g., fixing water infrastructure, economic development, local benefits).
• Examples of constructive partnership exist—local innovation and insistence on better outcomes could improve industry behavior.

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10. Geopolitics and the ‘Environmental Nationalism’ Dilemma

[100:42 - 105:11]

• The U.S. is comparatively slower, more democratic, and more protective of local lands—but China (and others) are building much larger, more modern grids and industrial bases.
• There is a tension between preserving landscapes and maintaining competitiveness, especially if conflict arises.
• Are we outsourcing the “mess” and potentially weakening national resilience in the process?

Quote:
“But there’s these things you can’t control that are out there—in some way we benefit from it. But... up until the point when we’re fighting a war with China... then we say, man, we shouldn’t have just let it be that they were doing it all...”
— Steven Rinella [103:35]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the psychological impact:
  “We depend on data centers every single day. Our lives are as dependent on energy as they are on digital, and now AI and energy are completely intertwined.”
  — Ann Davis Vaughn [19:39]

• On political posturing:
  “If you’re running a governor’s race... you can’t really be for AI data centers, or you have to be demanding a new policy on how the power gets done.”
  — Ann Davis Vaughn [96:46]

• On evaluating local benefit:
  “If you listen to tech and what they think they can make off of them, then you realize the tax base of some of these communities could go up hundreds of percent... that pays for a lot, including helping communities that are struggling.”
  — Ann Davis Vaughn [114:56]

• On the NIMBY dynamic:
  “The only thing I can really do here is... make it that it’s not right there. If I can do that, if I can make it not across the road from my house, I accept the rest and that’ll be my fight.”
  — Steven Rinella [113:25]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [04:33] — What is a modern data center?
• [10:43] — When did public debate explode?
• [15:05] — Pros & cons: boiling fears and hopes down
• [23:09] — Water usage: contextualizing vs. agriculture, industry, and lifestyle
• [30:05] — The psychology of what “feels” normal (farms, food, landscape)
• [39:37] — Data centers’ direct water use compared to single crops and industries
• [47:12] — How do companies choose data center locations?
• [57:03] — Nimbyism, local economies, who benefits—who pays?
• [63:32] — Blue vs. red: bipartisan backlash emerges
• [71:12] — Power grid, grid “headroom,” investments and innovation
• [80:14] — Broader AI-driven energy demand and innovation
• [85:35] — Leverage, incentives, and negotiation at the community level
• [100:42] — U.S. vs. China: environmental nationalism and global stakes
• [109:17] — Will opposition stop the build-out? The future of communities and regret

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Closing Thoughts

Both Vaughn and Rinella urge listeners to:

• Contextualize the scale and intensity of data center impacts
• Recognize the complexity of trade-offs between prosperity, preservation, and national strategy
• Demand more transparent, rational, and locally responsive negotiations
• Accept that the transformation is already underway—so communities’ best play is to negotiate for the best outcomes, not simply try to stop change in its tracks

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Further Reading:
Ann Davis Vaughn writes bi-weekly on AI infrastructure at TheInformation.com (also finds summaries on LinkedIn) and is completing a forthcoming book, Gigawatt, on the AI industrial boom and its reshaping of the energy and American industrial landscape.

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Summary prepared for listeners who want detail and clarity without needing to hear the episode—using the guests’ own language and preserving tone and nuance.

Transcript

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Ann Davis Vaughn]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Ann Davis Vaughn]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Ann Davis Vaughn]

The Meat Eater Podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

You can't predict anything. Brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need GE that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That's F I R-S-T L I T E dot com okay, folks. Here by popular Demand is our show where we dive into data centers from a natural resources perspective. People are always writing in, asking about, why don't we cover this more? We should do it. Part of the problem is I was trying to find the perfect person to do it because I just want someone that can look at this at the data center debate from an informed perspective, from an even perspective. Someone that's not trying to drive a particular narrative or that's in the pocket of a certain set of interests. Like someone to take a journalistic look at what is going on with data centers. And she's here an Davis Vaughn and was a longtime Wall Street Journal energy and finance reporter. Then she became an investment analyst, which is basically where you like do investigative reporting on companies.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's right. I was like an investigative reporter for portfolio managers.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. So. So if they wanted to make an investment, you go dig up the dirt or the good stuff.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

The best version of the truth you can find.

[Steven Rinella]

Best version the truth you can find. And now an has reentered journalism and is writing a book which likely, likely will be called Gigawatt. And it is about the AI industrial boom, how it is reshaping the energy industry, the industrial landscape and the American heartland. She currently writes. This is, this is where I found an. She currently writes a column for the information. So it's information.com the information.com the information.com friends send me. Our friends would send me your columns. And she writes a. A column on AI infrastructure for the Information Dot com. That's a publication based out of Silicon Valley. What I liked about it about your writing when I would Read it is. It was like. It was very refreshing to hear someone looking at the issue that, that I, I felt hadn't already arrived at all the answers, but was just asking questions and also taking, as we're going to get into taking a lot of measurements, measurements of water, measurements of energy, measurements of footprint, and putting those measurements sort of into context and comparing them to things that, that people might understand. So rather than hearing about some kind of wattage, comparing that to other industrial applications, other things that we're all familiar with, so you start to form a relative picture. So thank you for coming on and thank you for sharing a bunch of your reporting, especially because you're doing this before your book comes out, which is good of you.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, well, thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited about your podcast and having come from the Blue Ridge Mountains and love the outdoors, it's a big part of sorting through what's happening today.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. Great. Can you start out by this? Kind of a dumb question, but I want, I want to do it. Can you start out by like telling people in 2026 when they see data center in a headline in the newspaper, okay, what exactly are they talking about? Like, it's a dumb question to say, like, what is a data center today?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Well, I'll tell you what it is not. It is not clouds in the sky. The data center is referred to as the cloud. It's like the. I think it's one of the best marketing decisions tech has ever made for itself is to call data centers a cloud.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

These are like, it's in the cloud. It's in the cloud. And this cloud is really an industrial complex. And so it's an industrial scale facility back kind of pre AI when we just thought of it as the cloud that holds our entire digital lives. And that means everything that, you know, we waste our time on and everything that is vital to our society. So, you know, how you save your pictures, how you stream your movies, how you listen to your podcasts, how you get money out of the atmosphere, how your payroll gets paid, how lifesaving machines stay on and scan your body and track data. It's all that the cloud. Data centers have been a pretty big part of the digital landscape since the mid 2000s. A lot of companies used to have basically their own data rooms, computer rooms, and they'd have servers that were in a closet. And eventually some of those got bigger. And of course, since, you know, for decades we've had government supercomputers that were far bigger than that. But this idea of a data center that started to grow commercially came with the rise of the Internet. These buildings would serve a variety of different customers. And the notion of these big tech software companies becoming cloud giants really meant that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they began to build buildings with rows, hallways of chips and servers and all the equipment that keeps them at this Goldilocks, you know, environment and temperature and fiber would go in and out and data would, you know, it was very important to have data have what is called low latency. So they tended to be in urban centers. And the.

[Steven Rinella]

What does low latency mean?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Low latency means quick. Like, you know, you know when you remember the days when you would try to watch a video and it would say buffering. Buffering, sure, yeah, yeah, that's low latency. And so you need instantaneous data for something lifesaving, like, you know, an emergency response system. Traders want instantaneous data. We get upset if we can't, you know, if a text doesn't come through right away. There are certain businesses that really are mission critical and that need to be near a city. So a lot of data centers got built in smaller fashion before the AI age, and especially Northern Virginia, near Washington D.C. and then some big cities like Dallas, Chicago, Phoenix out on, you know, the west coast and both the Silicon Valley area and then up in the Pacific Northwest near Seattle.

[Steven Rinella]

And was it, was it really that proximity in those days, which is just like yesterday? Yeah, the proximity to user groups was important, like physical proximity to big populations of people.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yes, because there's a limit to how quickly data will travel on fiber. And we're talking just nanoseconds. We're not talking. We're really unwilling to wait for a few seconds for something to come through. So they were built under that premise that giant amounts of fiber got built in the dot com era. There was a whole bunch of it left, didn't get used. And then we kind of built into that in the 2000s and in the 2010s and when Covid happened, people started using online digital resources like crazy, and even more continued to be built. And so then when ChatGPT and AI as a new paradigm kind of really came on the scene around 2022, there began to be the conception of a whole nother kind of scale of data center. So AI data centers are bigger, more power hungry, more resource hungry, really, because AI models operate on a scaling phenomenon. And so the idea is that it's not just a building with a whole bunch of different companies siloed computing taking place but instead it is one big campus where all the chips are connected to all the other chips and they're all talking to each other. And it's like one big brain. And the more powerful models that have been trained have operated on this concept. And so we're building even bigger ones now, and that they operate altogether big. That means bigger footprint for these data centers, more industrial equipment to bring them the electricity and to cool them. And that's why they are basically factories.

[Steven Rinella]

And all the time that we've been like, well, let me re. Approach that, maybe you can correct me on the timeline. But, but at what point was it a year ago? Was it 18 months ago? what point was it that all of a sudden this debate about data centers and the environmental impact of data centers exploded?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So you probably have a different view of it because you follow this and report on it, but try to, like, in your mind, think of, think of just a normal concerned citizen who reads a few newspapers in the morning. Like, like, help me remember, when was it at all sudden? It was just like the issue.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

It was the issue around the end of 2025 and early 2026.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, so it was recent.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because what struck me is where was the argument about data centers prior to that? Was there one?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yes, there was. And if you go back, you will find some pushback from a few years ago. I think that the scale just had not hit people. And so this AI boom has gone through several stages. And at first it was just like, what is this AI thing? What is ChatGPT? It's going to change everything. And then there was this stage when I was actually still working as an investment analyst where everyone was saying, how much power are we going to need and where is it going to go? The financial and energy and tech types were mobilizing and everyone was saying, can we really use this much power? Then there was maybe in the fall of last year, an absolute panic over whether AI was a bubble and whether we're spending too much. Because at that stage, everyone was really focused on how much the tech guys were going to be spending and, you know, every quarter and how they had gone from just being so cash rich to spending, you know, a great deal of their cash flow. And so all during that time, the, the, the, you know, wildcatters that were trying to put AI together and find places to put it were going to communities and starting to make plans for data centers, and individual communities were having meetings and saying, what do we think about this? But the populace in general is not super engaged on their local community level. We've kind of turned polarized and less local news to consume anyway in the digital age, sadly. And people have, you know, whatever they're concerned about on the national level. And all of a sudden, these campuses started to get constructed, and people started to say, wait a minute, like, I didn't know this was happening. And, well, you know, some of. Some of this may have been done just like any kind of industrial real estate project might have been in the past, where people go to the local zoning authorities, they say, hey, we're with this company. We want to buy this land. Can we put this application in? You know, normally the public is not watching every move on that front, but all of a sudden, there was this collective realization that there had been a kind of rush out into the middle of the country because these data centers were on a totally different scale than the cloud data centers and were going to need to go places where there was enough land or where there was enough power, where there was some headroom in whether it was water, the grid, and that is. It kind of started to reach a fever pitch, I would say. I noticed it on a trip to Wisconsin in early February, the. Where the backlash had grown just exponentially.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, Yeah, I want to do a thing where you give me. You can pick, or you can do neither, or we can play a game to figure out who does it. Like, I want to do the positives just before we get into some of the details. I want to do the positives and negatives. You can take both of them. I can take one. You can do both. You can sell me on the hysterical view. I don't want to load it too much. You can sell me on, like, why this is upsetting to people, and you can sell me on why it's exciting to some. Right. Or we can split the job up. It's up to you.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Well, okay, so the worries are that data centers are going to destroy our environment. They're going to, you know, destroy our health, that they'll drain Lake Michigan. They'll, you know, raise the temperature above the buildings and into our neighborhoods. They'll poison the water supply. They'll spike our power bills, they'll only take subsidies and not give anything back to local communities, and that it's all happening in secret. So I think that's part of the.

[Steven Rinella]

That's the vibe I get. That's the vibe I get of the panic.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And not to even mention that it's existential to humanity and it could destroy humanity.

[Steven Rinella]

Not.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Not a Small concern either.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Because that, that's a certain thing is it'd be in looking at water consumption, energy consumption footprint. There's also just, it's fueled by a general apprehension and it'd be like, so that it can take my job.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I got to give up all that. I got to give up clean water, I got to give up all this stuff. I got to accept this eyesore into my community so that then this can take my friends jobs.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's right. And my future, my children's future jobs.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And I don't think that the tech industry has done itself any favors by, you know, carrying out a narrative that is, you know, potentially quite exaggerated in that view. But you know, candidly, we all have a lot to learn as time unfolds. So. Yeah, I mean, you ask like, how do you separate or figure out what is truth and what is crazy and what is rational to worry about? And I guess I would start with what is rational to worry about. It is very rational to worry about to fear change and uncertainty. And we are facing an incredible turning point. We're in the early days of the AI revolution and there's incredible fear and uncertainty and that's rational. And I think it's rational to love your community and to love the character of your community. And you know, especially if you've, you know, even if there's been some economic decline, you've kind of made peace with that, or you kind of love where you're from and you kind of enjoy a little bit of the peace that has come with some of the economic decline in your region and the natural beauty instead making, you know, like coming to grips with it looking completely different is, I think that's very rational. Like some of the scale of what I'm talking about in rural communities, we are talking about in the end, a campus that I sometimes think of it as like, you know, five Pentagons, like landing in the field across from your house.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

These are huge campuses, some of them.

[Steven Rinella]

You give it to me in Walmarts.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, like, well, it's many more than Walmart super campuses. Like a meta campus In Louisiana is 5 miles long and 1 mile wide.

[Steven Rinella]

Are you kidding?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And so I've driven the perimeters of

[Steven Rinella]

this, what, a concrete slab five miles?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Not a concrete. It's many buildings. So it's many buildings with land in between. And when they're finished, they will have some grass and they will have some parking lots and they will.

[Steven Rinella]

But the footprint of that thing is five miles by a mile.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. That particular campus.

[Steven Rinella]

It's the footprint. It's the footprint of a large municipal airport.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yes. It's not dissimilar from an airport. And so it is rational to say, wait, this scale is truly. It feels nuts to me. And the truth is that the landscape has changed through many years of other industrial revolutions. Railroads have crisscrossed and, you know, may. Maybe some thought at the time scarred the landscape, and we got used to those. We have airports.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah. If someone like today was proposing the railroad infrastructure as a new concept, you'd never get it done.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

You'd never get it done. Today.

[Steven Rinella]

They're like, hey, I got an idea.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

I'm gonna run.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, we're gonna run these continuous lines all across the country and eminent domain, everything. Yeah, you'd never get it through.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

I'm gonna put poles up with wires all over every single street in America.

[Steven Rinella]

Every street will have a pole with wires, and people will be like, no way. You're not doing that.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's rational to, you know, and it's understandable, too, that people see technology and these. They see data centers as the embodiment of how tech has changed our lives and, you know, for the worse, perhaps. And they sort of see it for the worse. And, of course, tech has also changed our lives for the better. And so I guess I would say what is not rational is to not look at and do this with some common sense and put context around it. So one piece of context. Well, look, we now have airports that are these giant pieces of land that we all depend on. The truth is, we do all depend on data centers every single day. Our lives are as dependent on energy as they are on digital. And now AI and energy are completely intertwined, and they pull in all kinds of other resources. And we're grappling with that and in real time, in a hurry. The tech industry is in a big hurry. And that's another part of people's unease is. Is how fast this is unfolding.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Podcast Announcer]

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[Steven Rinella]

Let's talk about some of the specifics. Some of the specific impacts is we start with water.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What amount of water, what amount of water are we talking about? I mean, let's look at it. You know, there's another question I got prior to that because it just kind of sets this whole thing up. When we talk about what's going to happen, what is a comfortable timeline? 10 years, we have no idea. Right? So there's sort of like what's proposed right now, what's in process right now? So if I say to you how much water are data centers going to use? What at what, what date are we looking at? Like what date is it fair to look at? Is it like right now? Is it two years from now?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

People use 20, 30 as the guidepost.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. So when we're talking about, it's just for people to remind, reminder here we're we're in 2026. When we're talking about how much water, how much footprint, we're sort of looking at reasonable projections about four years from now. Is that cool? Okay, so when I read articles talking about Data centers and resistance to data centers and things. One of the big issues that comes up is, where is all this water coming from? And that winds up being, like, relevant. It's relevant to all Americans because we all rely on abundant clean water. It's relevant to agriculture, obviously, because food. And then in. In a sort of niche way, it's very relevant to, like, me as a fisherman and an outdoorsman, you know, like. Like the fact that our country, as wealthy as it is and as populous as it is, still has this, like, abundance of clean water full of fish relative to other places around the world. That's like, of tremendous value. So when I hear of something that might threaten that, I get anxious. You know, how do we look at the water issue here?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, so I think. So I just. A couple of caveats that I am. I'm not a water scientist. And I'm also in the process as I work on this book of interrogating this topic from every angle that I can and, you know, striving to figure out the best version of the truth so that, you know, we can all talk apples to apples. And so I've attempted, recently did a column on water for the information and have attempted to do that for the book as well, sort of saying, how much water, you know, does this industry really consume? And has that changed? So it has changed, actually. The data centers are getting bigger, but they're getting more water efficient.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

So let's put kind of water, broadly speaking, in perspective so that this is kind of a rough exercise. And again, like, there are many resources that folks who have, like, helped me think through this are drawing from. Okay, okay, but so we don't get alarmed by contextless numbers. You hear something like billions of gallons of water being used a year. And that sounds astonishingly large.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

But in fact, big industries, including agriculture, are using trillions of gallons a year.

[Steven Rinella]

So the other thing you hear, and it's kind of glib, is you'll do. You'll do a search, right? You do like a thing on chat GPT. And then people be like, well, there goes a gallon of water.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, yeah, so we'll talk about it.

[Steven Rinella]

You hear it, but you don't really. No one knows what I shouldn't say. No one. Most people don't really know what they're saying.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. Okay, so let's start big and we'll kind of telescope out and then go in a little bit. So there's like, you know, if you maybe you can keep a number in your head of like, fresh water consumption in the US in the like 30 trillion gallons a year range. And

[Steven Rinella]

that's what we're using.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, you know, and. 30 trillion gallons a year. And single crops in the United States use as much as 3 trillion gallons a year. Okay. So corn or alfalfa, like for livestock. And a third of the corn, you know, harvest is going to ethanol. So these are just single crops. And so agriculture, irrigation for agriculture, does consume something like. 70% of our fresh water. So we're already using a lot of our fresh water for irrigated crops. And so corn, like 3 trillion gallons a year. California almonds, 1.2 to 1.8 trillion gallons.

[Steven Rinella]

Seriously?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Seriously.

[Steven Rinella]

See, corn and alfalfa. I get it because, like. Yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

You're not an almond lover.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, no, no, I'll eat almond now and then, but you know, the country's not going to without alfalfa and being able to feed cattle. Right. It's not going to happen.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, we might get along with that.

[Steven Rinella]

Almond for ethanol and livestock feed and other things. It's not going to happen. But it's like, I don't mean to hack on the almond people. Like, I like Almond Joy as much as the next guy was saying, like the almond thing seems, I don't know, I don't want to hack farmers. Yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Just, you know, we don't need to pick on them because there's, there's plenty of examples of dairy farming. Dairy farming is, is enormously water consumptive. And about an estimated like 93% of the water footprint of dairy farming is actually just to feed cows or you know, basically to raise crops.

[Steven Rinella]

But dairy's got to blow. Dairy's gotta blow almonds out of the water. As like a. Not quite a pun, but yeah, I,

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

you know, I think it's, it's, it's way up there. I guess it like the statistic that I came to arm with is that a gallon of milk, and this is from the US dairy industry's like, sustainability reports. A gallon of milk takes 144 gallons of water to produce.

[Steven Rinella]

Really?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And a pound of cheese takes 164 gallons of water.

[Steven Rinella]

So how come when you take a sip, like when I put a little half and half in my coffee, no one goes like, well, there goes three gallons of water.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

I think that we have normalized. We love our farms. We love our food.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I love farms.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

We, you know, we love farms, Fields blowing in the breeze. And yeah, no complains about having a

[Steven Rinella]

farm field across the road. Yeah, that's a selling point.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

You Know, and a lot of people will say, and I had a farmer say this to me who sold a very large chunk of land to Meta. You know, I hear over and over, nobody can eat a data center. He's like, well, these are, you know, his words, not mine, but he's like, don't tell that to me. When, you know, we have 7 million acres of. Sorry, when we're using, you know. Yeah, 7 million acres just in Illinois, or 30 million acres of, of corn that is harvested is going to ethanol. So we're not eating ethanol. We shouldn't be eating ethanol.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's a miss. Like on the land use front. I think that that's a little bit of a. I don't know how widespread it is, but I would say with people not adjacent to agriculture, I would say when you're driving, when you're in the, in the upper Midwest and you're driving through corn monocultures, I think that most people, most urban people feel that they are in a food production landscape, and they don't view it, that they are in a fuel production landscape. They are in a fuel and energy production landscape. And it'd be like, I don't even want to equate it to an oil field because it's soil. It could be repurposed for other things. Right. It's not developed, it's not under concrete. It can be used. You could grow different crops there next year if you wanted to. But it's energy. Yeah, you're looking at energy production.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

So that's some of the ag. Let's take like lawn irrigation and golf courses.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

All lawn irrigation in the United States also equates to about 3 trillion a year. And golf courses use about a half a trillion gallons of water a year. You get into like, individual, like the

[Steven Rinella]

golf course, you take all the water used by Americans to water their grass or gardens and that. And that. That's 3 trillion. And that golf courses are sucking up a half trillion.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. So like golf courses, there's a difference between consumptive water use and water that is used, that is returned to its sources. We can talk about that.

[Steven Rinella]

Just, just, I want to tell listeners. Yeah, we'll get into this because of course, the amount of water on earth is a constant. So we need to talk about. When you say that you're using water, what does it mean? Yeah, like, just to give one example, at our fish shack, we pull water out of a creek. It runs through our fish shack, but goes back into the creek.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you. I mean, so it's like we're just detaining it for a minute and putting it right back where it came from at the same temperature in like measured in quartz. But I'm saying it's like. So you'd be like, are we using water? Like when I turn the hose on, am I using water? Because that water's flowing right back into where I got it from. So we'll get into that a little bit. Like, like when the data center is using water, how are they using it? And why can't they put it back where they found it? We'll talk about this a little bit.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Well, your fish shack. Let's now zoom into a much higher industrial scale, which would be a power plant is doing something similar to your fish shack. It is withdrawing a pretty large amount of water from water sources like lakes and rivers. But approximately 90 to 90%, 5% of the water gets returned to its source. Now, not always.

[Steven Rinella]

It still gets counted as usage, though.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

It's counted as usage, but not. But if you really think of consumption, it's not all like, you know, maybe water is considered consumed. And this is where you want to go to an expert. But like, generally speaking, when it evaporates and it doesn't. It's not directly that.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, yeah, that's the number I'm interested in where you've moved it. I don't want to get too in the weeds on this, but like once you evaporate it and put it into cloud cover, you're moving it to different drainages, you're moving it to different basins, and you're like, you're redistributing water rather than you're keeping it in a closed circuit system.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

But anyways. But keep hitting me with how much the relative on water.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Let's look at the electric sector though. But it still uses around 45 trillion gallons annually. The power generating electricity to cool thermal power. So thermal power would be like coal plants, natural gas plants and nuclear plants as opposed to solar or hydroelectric. But only about 5% of that is fully consumed and it's returned to its source. And there are regulations around this, but none of us like to think of warm water going into a pristine ecosystem. So there's regulation around this and there's ways that it is dealt with from,

[Steven Rinella]

from a fishing perspective. Yeah, which is how I look at many things in life. A hot water discharge is a blessing and a curse, you know, because like a hot water discharge could be the best fishing place in the world. It could also be what destroys A body of water. Yeah, by changing the water temperature. So it's like, it's a, it's a funny, you know, like many anglers, especially in the Great Lakes area, have like a complicated relationship with hot water discharges, you know?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like the fish are just there.

[Podcast Announcer]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And you're like, it's kind of like you're cheating. They're there for the hot water discharge and then at the time, other times a year, it makes the water too damn warm, you know?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Right. Yeah. And it changes the fishing conditions and you can't fish at all.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So people have a, there's like, in my world, there's a, there's a, like a complicated relationship with those things.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But yeah, they're putting it back, they're putting it back where they got it from, but it's just a lot hotter.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. So the electric sector, this is where you really want to focus when you're thinking about data centers. So members of the data center industry have made significant strides in changing how they do water out of necessity. So AI runs hotter than traditional computing. It takes a lot more electricity and it puts it into much denser racks of like, you know, tightly, tightly networked chips and servers and memory and all this stuff. And so they've now learned to do what's called closed loop cooling. Literally they'll run a cooling liquid which can include water and glycol in over chips and, and in these tiny tubes that get into bigger tubes and eventually also need to go up to a, or out to a big set of equipment that cools that water and then it sends it all back to do it all over again.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

When today's really advanced AI data centers get built, they get filled up with a pretty small amount of water. Like for example, a Microsoft facility in Wisconsin was filled. I think it's a handful of swimming pools worth of water is about what a car wash would use in a year. Not too much. People have forgotten how much water other industrial things, factories, steel mill, any industrial plant uses water. So chip foundries use a giant amount of water. So on a relative basis, the data center guys will sometimes say we're hardly using any water. But there is a trade off that they I think would be smart to just upfront acknowledge because the closed loop cooling is using a lot of new advanced equipment and existing technologies that we've known about that basically are very energy intensive. And so that means they draw more power to do that. And that means that if they are using the output of a thermal power plant that is up the road. That thermal power plant is using a lot of water to cool its facilities and make the power. And so we're kind of trading one problem for another.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, they're dropping off on water used to pick, but then they need energy to cool the water.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. Then they need energy and that needs to be cooled at the power plant. So the much bigger offenders in the water for the digital economy are electric power plants. And actually chip foundries are extremely water intensive and they use ultra pure water and it takes a large kind of extra amount of water to get it fully pure and to do that. And some of it is consumptive. And so there are some water treatment and you know, technology companies that have done some really interesting studies. You know, Xylem's done one that I wrote about in my last column, just showing it's. If you kind of, if you can visualize like these two layers of giant mountains of water use and they are semiconductor plants and power plants and then there's kind of a ribbon on the top which is data centers.

[Steven Rinella]

So with all those, hit a couple of those again. Like hit me with, with the water use of agriculture.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, so.

[Steven Rinella]

Or like the total water use. Hit me with a couple. And then tell me in 2030, what are we looking at for that? Crops.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Single crops, Big, big crops in the US might be 3 trillion gallons a year of water. Direct water use of data centers has been estimated at roughly 18 billion gallons. So remember, a billion is a thousand less order of magnitude. 1,000 less than a trillion. So, so 3 trillion for a single crop, US data center use. 18 billion. We're talking way, way smaller. And that's 2030 projection like a quarter of a percent. What. And so it's just important to kind of keep some of that in perspective because even the data center footprint of on site plus the amount consumed in the electric sector, you take how much power they're using, you take, you have to haircut it because not all power is thermal power. And you also have to haircut it because it's not just as we said, all consumed. And it's still like we're talking 1% of fresh water. Even maybe by 2030, the data centers might be using in a more consumptive fashion.

[Steven Rinella]

Is it safe to say that it's the, the, a part of the concern is it's like it's, it's, it's added mortality on water. Meaning we're, we're used to, we're comfortable with how much water we're using for energy. How much water we're using for agriculture. And we've just become numb to it. We, we just look at it like, it's just like, how are you. And someone, someone comes and says, I'm going to draw, yeah, blank billion gallons.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

It is an added stressor for sure.

[Steven Rinella]

But, but in the context of the, and I know you're not, you know, and you know, I know you're not looking at this from, from an apologist perspective, but it's just very interesting to hear from a relative sense of other industries what we're talking about. Because the impression one would get. The impression one would get is that we're talking about a level of water, like an unprecedented level of water use.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. Well, then we should also talk about why people are alarmed. Well, first, I'll tell you something that's really depressing, which is about, it depends on the estimate, but 18 to 30% of municipal water system water is getting wasted completely because of leaks. Leaky pipes, old infrastructure. Water utilities are typically owned by municipalities. They are underfunded and they didn't have great technology. Today it exists to kind of monitor and figure out where leaks are. And so even as we use more water for industrial purposes, for data centers, we're leaving so much of it where we can't access it. Like it's just fallen out of our water system. So that's tough. The other problem is that a lot of digital infrastructure is going to, to water stressed places. And so in individual places, it's a bigger incremental stress on the system. It's a very big incremental stress.

[Steven Rinella]

What is the rationale? Well, maybe we should do that one. Next is the physical footprint. But go on, on water. We'll talk about physical footprint next.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, so. Well, you know, you've seen a lot of chip plants locate in the Southwest in the Phoenix area, a lot of data centers are there too. And when I have been traveling the country looking at the AI boom and where the next generation of digital infrastructure is getting built, it's getting built in the middle of the country effectively. And some of them are in water stressed areas. So we kind of think of the American west and the sort of more desert landscape as water stress. So the Colorado River Basin for sure is an area of significant water stress. The Ogallala water aquifer, which goes from South Dakota down to Texas.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Basically beneath the American Great Plains.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And in both cases there have been alarms sounded about water before the AI boom in these regions, but they're for a variety of different reasons. Good places to build AI data center campuses.

[Steven Rinella]

We have a blast every summer. Fishing, swimming, camping out, shooting bows, sitting around the fire. Last weekend we were floating a creek and then doing some metal detecting and we found what I believe to be a very old horseshoe. It's all the best. And if you're looking for the perfect companion to your summer adventures, try the refreshing citrus kick of Mountain Dew. From its beginnings in the foothills of Tennessee, invented by two brothers back in 1948, Mountain Dew has been a constant and they've got proud American roots. It's an American original of citrusy goodness. You can celebrate summer and America's 250th birthday with mountain Dew. Whether you're at the grill on the beach or right in your living room, sipping on a Mountain Dew is a great way to start a damn good time. Enjoy the refreshing citrus kick of Mountain Dew, an American original tasting great since 48. Look for mountain Dew in stores near you@mountain Dew.com that's Mountain Dew.com well, it's here folks.

[Podcast Announcer]

The 2026 Meat Eater Auction House of Oddities is back and open for bids now. This year's auction features eyebrow raising outdoor gear donated by the meat eater crew, employees and friends of the brand, including Steve's dad's shitty old truck full of badass hunting gear, the Honda outboard motor from DOS Boat Season 3, Clay Newcomb's Alaskan wetsuit, bear hide, fly fishing memorabilia from the personal collection of Lefty Crate, and more. The auction house kicks off July 8 and runs for two weeks with 100% of proceeds going to our Land Access initiative, which to date has helped fund new public land acquisitions such as the recent 200 acre Tuckertown acquisition in North Carolina, the 328 acre Wildcat Bend acquisition in Montana, and the 215 acre Shiloh Pond project in Maine. Visit Themeater.com auction to place your bids. Now get your hands on some meat eater history and become a meaningful part of our next public land access campaign.

[Steven Rinella]

At this point, if I carry in my mind from just being a concerned citizen, if I carry in my mind an idea that water consumption is a major implication of AI infrastructure, and then someone tells me that, that data centers, that people are building data centers and they're tending toward the Colorado Basin, the Glala Aquifer, so like the American Great Plains, the Southwest, and I have the water thing in my mind, I'm like, that seems ridiculous. But is it? Are they going? Are data centers now going where it makes sense to put a data center? Or are they going where they're welcome. Like, like when they look at. When they look at, like where should we try. Right. Is it. They won't put up a fuss. Let's go there. Water be damned.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Or are they like, no, for. For all these reasons of infrastructure, this is the place to be.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. So water is a factor in where they go. And there are data centers being placed in areas with plentiful water too. I just got.

[Steven Rinella]

They don't want it either though. But anyways, go on.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Well, water, it's less of a footprint than the energy that these facilities. We're talking about energy too, but they're going to different spots. So for example, they're going to the Mississippi river delta in Mississippi and Louisiana.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Why. Let's take that one for instance.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

I didn't know that water availability is a draw to go there. Right. And I literally was driving a week and a half ago through Louisiana past bayous where the tree trunks are basically swimming in water. Right. There's water everywhere. And it's. A farmer said to me that this aquifer will not. Does not have a drain. Drain the water supply. Now that does not mean that water is not precious everywhere. Right. And so Texas is getting an enormous number of these new data centers and water scarcity is a big issue in Texas. And you know, like, there's a new study out of the University of Texas that looks at both the direct water use, which as I've said is getting better at data centers, and the indirect water use from power, which is getting worse. Worse in some ways. It depends on what we end up putting in as the power source. Right. If we don't build coal plants, that's a whole lot better for the water supply.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

But the Texas could end up having. Right now data centers are only 0.4% of water use. But growing water needs for AI could bump up just in Texas, the water used directly and indirectly from AI to as much as 5%. And that would be, you know, that would exceed that of livestock and mining. It would still be well short of irrigated farming. But there are places that are water stressed where, you know, it is not trivial the buildup of what we're trying to. What the tech industry is, is intending.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And then the other thing in Texas is you have, you have an exploding human population.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So when, when urban planners are thinking about water consumption into the future and you're talking about an industry going from 0.4 to 5%, that's like meaningful water. But like, but to that Question of when. When these entities that build data centers survey the country, why are they picking where they pick?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Why are they picking it? The very biggest factor is power. So we have an aging power grid. And while we have lost some power users because we have de. Industrialized we have a grid that has not kept up with progress of the economy and now needs both because of extreme weather and just general age needs a lot of investment. And the power grid just cannot handle gigawatt scale power just anywhere. So what is a gigawatt? A gigawatt is as much power as the whole city of San Francisco or Denver consumes in how much time. It's a. It's a capacity figure. You can also look at. At energy as a. Like this. You need plants capable of producing this much a gigawatt.

[Steven Rinella]

So. So a plant would, you're saying like an AI data center and a campus data center. Campus would feasibly use the same amount of power that is being used in Denver.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Correct. Or more. There are multi gigabytes.

[Steven Rinella]

And that's like the residents, the businesses, the manufacturing community.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, the whole community. And, and as going to this concentrated place. Yeah, it's a big landmass, but we're talking a few thousand acres where that much power could be going into a single place. So it's, it's.

[Steven Rinella]

The scale of it is quite selecting areas where the. Where there's the possibility of getting and moving that amount of power.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. And that has, it's not like, you know, just because there are power lines going through a property or just because there's a power plant, a nuclear power plant in the vicinity that is available. So then you get to things like power congestion and the ability to pull a large amount of power to a single location. And so it becomes this really complicated matrix of factors that are bringing people places. So it's, you know, can the power. Are there pockets of power that are accessible? Does the community or the state make it easy to build? Is there water? This is not the very first concern though. Is there fiber? Fiber is easier to lay, but we also had a glutt fiber that was laid in the dot com days. These are some of the concerns. Others are land value. You will now see data center developments going up. It's at in, you know, virtually everywhere.

[Steven Rinella]

Are they actually looking for land? Like when you factor all this in, are they. Are, are they actually looking for land deals like the cost of the land matters to them?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, the cost of the land matters. Places where data centers are quite saturated, like Northern Virginia. The, you Know, the land values have, have approached, you know, in the millions of per acre and you can't really even get a campus that's that big. And so.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

You know, AI starts with these big training campuses that are big. But eventually and not too long from now, we're going to hear a lot more about how do you fill in the smaller but, you know, state of the art data centers to do what is called inference, which is basically the thing that makes money, which is finding the answers to your questions, querying the model and getting back the answer, which could be driving your autonomous car through a town. A data center is going to do that for you. It could be figuring out the cure for a rare disease. The data center will do that for you.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you have little kids?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

I have three older kids, teenagers and ones in her 20s.

[Steven Rinella]

Isn't it weird that you run around yelling at them about leaving the lights on? Yeah, what you should do, you should yell at them about not looking stuff up on the Internet. Yeah, you should be like, don't look pancake recipes up on the Internet. You can look it up in a cookbook. Well, I did also leave the lights on in your room. It's inconsequential. Right. It's just, it's insane.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

There are calculators that show you asked about, like just to go back to the water thing for a minute, does a ChatGPT query really use a bottle of water?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I don't even know. I hear all the numbers, but I

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

don't know what there was a study that said. So there are also data points that indicate a far smaller amount, like a teaspoon, two teaspoons. And I'm not the expert to fully parse that out, but the one thing that I could say with some confidence is that computing is getting more efficient, even AI computing every day. It's this quandary that the industry has. They can't find enough power, water land, they can't get enough of their computing into these places. So everybody in the whole value chain is innovating, trying to do it with less. And so I wouldn't be surprised if there are big advances and perhaps these newer estimates of what a ChatGPT search does use in water are taking into account some of that efficiency. But you're going to have the problem right now is that there are wildly different estimates and plenty of them are scary numbers that have no context around them. They haven't been compared to anything else.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's the problem you run into before we started record. We Were having, we, we. We were talking and you had mentioned, you'd mentioned that there's become like a sort of red state, blue state divide on data center placement.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, well, except it's now become bipartisan against.

[Steven Rinella]

It's become bipartisan against.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, like, let's talk a little bit about. Because just on this, on this idea of physical placement, right. There's a, there's a big. I think that there's generally like a nimby, a not in my backyard component to this, where most of the fights you see about data centers, from my perspective, you may have a different perspective. Most of the fights you see about data centers are localized, meaning one's going in near you, one's going near you in Wisconsin, one's going in near you in Michigan, one's going in near you in Montana, and all of a sudden it gets real. Right. And then you want to talk about, what does this mean, water usage here, what does this mean, energy use here? What does it mean for just the visual quality of the landscape here? I'm sure there are crusaders on a national sense, but I'm more familiar with the localized fights. Right. As you've looked at this, what have you found about the mentalities or like the communities that want it, the communities that don't like, what sort of differentiates them? Is it ideology, like political ideology? What is it, you know, a friendly town versus an antagonistic town?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Well, it's a combination of how they feel they were treated from the beginning and how, you know, their ability to imagine what the future could hold for them, possibly economically. So Northern Virginia has a very heavy concentration of data centers today, and it takes 25% of power use in Virginia now goes to data centers. And it's mostly concentrated the whole state. And people in Northern Virginia have benefited economically from the tax revenue. So data centers don't employ as many people, especially the older data centers. They therefore don't bring a big burden on hospitals, schools, roads, ambulance, all that stuff. Yeah, but they're like ghost towns.

[Steven Rinella]

Once they're built, they're like ghost towns. Right.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

The cloud data centers employed, it could be like 20 people. Although the bigger AI data centers are going to employ hundreds of people. Some of them even say in the four figures, some of these places have had a huge influx of tax revenue. They've improved their schools. Northern Virginia fits that. Even so, it gets to a certain point where people are living with these developments right up in their backyard, in some cases, nice homes and a big data center right behind. And they're starting to say no more. They're starting to worry about backup power doesn't run all the time, but it has to test. And then if there's a power outage, that's gonna burn diesel. Diesel is one of the worst things that you can burn for air pollution and health. And so Northern Virginia is an example of a community that welcomed data centers, kind of prospered with them, and is starting to hit a breaking point.

[Steven Rinella]

The mood's starting to sour.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

The mood has started to get much tougher, and there's gonna have to be a conversation even. So, even in Northern Virginia, there's the actual land use of data centers by just square footage is the campuses themselves are still less than 3% of the land in Loudoun county, the most data center populated county. And if you just looked at the buildings, it was less than 1% of the land. And that is data center capital.

[Steven Rinella]

But that's.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

It's not nothing. Because when you think about landscape.

[Steven Rinella]

I know, but that's a weird way to think about landscape that you're saying a percent of the. Of a county.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Is under a data center. I think I would want to know what percent of the county is under a house. Because, I mean, like, I don't even know what to make of that. You know what I mean? It's like. It's like the point you made about that. You hear these numbers, but without context, it's hard to understand. It's like, I don't think that. I don't hear that a percent of a county sits underneath a data center. I don't hear that and think that's not much.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, yeah, but.

[Steven Rinella]

But I don't know. But again, I don't know what percent's under schools. I don't know what percent is under homes, you know?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Right, right.

[Steven Rinella]

But it feels to me like a ton.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

There are, you know, certainly denser urban environments. This becomes a real concern with. With, you know, so many resources and water flow and everything. So the communities that, you know, some communities that have welcome data centers are still experiencing backlash. And I think it's because it's just such a profound change. But there are parts of the country that also have economic synergies, I guess you could say, with this type of an industry. They have factories that can and are producing the equipment that goes inside. They've got a workforce of electrical and mechanical and trades craft workers who have been underemployed for a long time, and that starts to kind of work together. There are several areas in the Rust Belt that the economic development authorities have either recruited data centers or were open to data centers coming. The workforce, especially like organized unions are very in favor of it. And then other residents who live in the midst of farmland are not in favor of it and don't want it. And so there are some really hard trade offs because we all need jobs and economic activity in our community and that is actually what ends up funding all of the infrastructure that makes the city livable.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I want to hit you with two ideas. One is you had mentioned that it used to be that like blue states or left leaning states were antagonistic data centers. Just speaking very generally, right leaning states were more welcoming to data centers. But you had said that it is, it is becoming the. You're finding resistance in right leaning states. We always talk about this thing. You familiar with this like horseshoe deal where like the right and left kind of come together? Yeah, the radical right and the radical left come together at the bottom of the horseshoe.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's who's against them. Yeah, it's these two. Two different sides.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. But they like, they almost meet.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

They almost meet.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that what is the sort of. What is the right leaning. What is the emerging right leaning argument against data centers? Is it like antagonism to big tech?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

It's partially antagonism to big tech. They're spying on my life. They are driving our young people the wrong direction. It's partially property rights. I will not have my property, you know, seized for a transmission line that, you know, sends power to, you know, Elon Musk's, you know, or Sam Altman's data center.

[Steven Rinella]

And so they can get rich off my land or whatever.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's right. And it's their way of life. I will tell you that when you go to some of those communities though, people will acknowledge a mixed feeling because some of them have sold their. You don't even have to have sold a big piece of property inside the data center to possibly have your property value, you know, a potential gain. Like maybe they want to lay down equipment in a yard and you've got a few acres where you could do that, that's nearby. Or you decided that you want to run a food truck and go sell to the workers. Or you know, there are a variety of. Maybe your land was used to build worker housing, like a man camp.

[Steven Rinella]

So is it generally. Are data centers generally raising property levels or is the inverse happening?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

There's such a land rush right now and these are such big construction projects that I think in many cases the properties near these projects do Experience, you know, rising property value.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Because picture we're talking about they're putting in a municipal wastewater treatment plant.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Compare that to, like a landfill coming to town.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Maybe that's going to be, like, good for some.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But the people around that are going to be like, that's going to tank my home value.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Right, right.

[Steven Rinella]

So with. In the data center landscape, when it comes to land ownership and land use in the data center landscape, I could see if they're coming in, they're gonna. They need this, you know, whatever many, you know, they need 5 square miles, 10 square miles of land. That the impact that the people that own those properties are going to see. Perhaps a little gold rush. Yeah, but what is the conversation about people that are outside of the footprint?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, it's tough.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, what are they seeing?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

They hate the traffic. Well, everybody hates traffic. Bipartisan rage against the traffic. And that lasts for several years in these big, big projects. Like, people bring that up way before global warming. They bring it up way before traffic. You know, traffic, Traffic, dust. Traffic. You know, so, you know, they were giving free car washes out in Wisconsin near the Port Washington Data Center.

[Steven Rinella]

No.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Maybe people appreciated it. It's a pretty small, you know, it's a small token of something. But, you know, seriously. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because it was. It's going to be dusty and dirty for a really long time.

[Steven Rinella]

There had been a lot of people that just did not want to accept that free car wash. My God, man.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

But you do go to places where this has been underway for at least a year. And. And there are hotels being redone. There are new restaurants that have come in. There are. And, you know, like, that's the case in Louisiana, and that's 30 minutes away from the data center site.

[Steven Rinella]

So it's a choice, some revitalization, some investment that's not totally tied to the data center.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's right. And, you know, like, these are. They're criticized as temporary jobs, but often these projects last for a few years longer than many people hold jobs. And then they tend to cluster like a good environment where people think they can get business done, they can build more. Come. So then it turns out that there are a lot of projects and a lot of people kind of moving from one to the other and. And their supervisors and their, you know, will rent apartments in a lot of. This is like idolized little things.

[Steven Rinella]

Not just, not just like ephemeral activity. It generates general economic activity.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, but, you know that there's. But I've also knocked on the door of houses that like the guy wasn't home, but he was sitting across from a new RV camp that was gonna. And he just had a little ranch house and flat as far as the eye could see in Texas Abilene. And across the street was being placed a 3000 RV camp, you know, with telephone, not telephone of contractors, poles. They were basically putting in water and power poles on an expanse of land that was extremely flat, broad, huge. Imagine 3,000 recreational vehicles. So this is where the workers would come. And so all of a sudden what was an empty field in front of him was almost looked like, you know, a future airport or something.

[Steven Rinella]

Was he pissed?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Well, he wasn't there that day when I knocked on his door. But I'm telling you, you'd have gotten a year old, probably have had a really different view. And so like there are some growing pains and some real concerns about growth.

[Podcast Announcer]

Well, it's here, folks. The 2026 Meat Eater Auction house of oddities is back and open for bids. Now this year's auction features eyebrow raising outdoor gear donated by the meat eater crew, employees and friends of the brand, including Steve's dad's shitty old truck full of badass hunting gear, the Honda outboard motor from DOS Boat Season 3, Clay Newcomb's Alaskan wetsuit, bear hide fly fishing memorabilia from the personal collection of lefty crate, and more. The auction house kicks off July 8 and runs for two weeks with 100% of proceeds going to our land access initiative, which to date has helped fund new public land acquisitions such as the recent 200 acre Tuckertown acquisition in North Carolina, the 328 acre Wildcat Bend acquisition in Montana, and the 215 acre Shiloh Pond project in Maine. Visit Themeater.com auction to place your bids. Now get your hands on some meat eater history and become a meaningful part of our next public land access campaign.

[Steven Rinella]

On the power front, can you tell me again in northern Virginia that the power increase for data centers again?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Well, it's 25% of power in the states goes to data centers, okay. And probably growing.

[Steven Rinella]

So however they're generating electricity, however they're generating power, it's not like, I mean, to a point, you probably go and just turn the dial up, right, and make more. Yeah, but I imagine when you're Talking about a 25% increase in power, you need to start looking at make like it's more than just cranking up what you got going on. Meaning if you're running hydroelectric, you know, you got turbines one through 13 running and you just kick 14 and 15 and 16 on to make up for the. The heavy use. There's a point at which that doesn't work anymore. And you need new ways.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

Like you need new power, Net new power production.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

But I mean, one thing that is a very hot topic of conversation that would be good for everybody is something called grid utilization, which we all as a society contribute to shared resources. And the power grid is one of those. And we are not utilizing the grid that we've already paid for to the extent that we could be. But technology is only now helping us understand how far up that level of headroom you could really go safely. And so there's all these new technologies and utilities are starting to be open to it to say, hey, yes, we do need to build more power. But turns out the grid is only. Actually, we're only using 30 to 50% of the power that we've already built on a given day because we overbuilt it for those days of peak power demand.

[Steven Rinella]

I see.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And our ability as a human mind to do the simulations to figure out how far you could push it just didn't go that far. So we just built a lot. We bought a lot of extra.

[Steven Rinella]

I understand. Like, let's say you're in a. Let's say you're in a town. You live in a coastal community that's a very popular summer destination.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And when it's awful. Know I was recently on.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Or if it gets really hot.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I was recently on the island and there's this little community on this island and someone told me, you know, how many people live here year round? There's 10 residents year round.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

In the summer there are 400 residents.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. So picture a town like that. And then picture the hottest day in the summer when everyone's elect, like turning on ac. I see your point. Where it's capable of that.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

But then come here in February when there's nobody here. So. Yeah. Presumably there's infrastructure that's not completely utilized. I hadn't really. I never thought of that before.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. And like the utility industry really needed somebody to wake it up, you know, or to push it because they are not incentivized to. Utilities have this perverse way of getting paid. It's just an incentive that got put in when we created monopoly utilities. And in the dawn of the electric age. And they make more money by spending more money, basically, they go to a utility commission and say, we need power for reliability purposes. I wanna build a new thing, a new power Plant a new line, a new. And they get a guaranteed rate of return if it is approved to compensate them for the capital that is needed for that. And so we all pay that. We all pay the cost of what it was to build plus an added rate of return. And sometimes you could argue that they didn't need to build that brand new thing. They should learn how to use what we've got. And so the tech industry is looking, they're in such a hurry and they've realized there are certain inefficiencies in the way the system is built and they have the money and the motivation to, to shake up the system and say, well hang on, yes, if I don't offer to pay my full share on all this new infrastructure, I know I will not have the social license to build and I will be vilified. But at the same time let me fund these pilot projects or let me add these sensors to lines because we could be determining how far we could push this. And I'm also willing to spend my own money to put batteries behind the meter and other systems. So when everybody is at that 400 person seaside resort and that state is hurting for electricity, I'd disappear from the grid. So so much of this is happening.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's interesting.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

People don't.

[Steven Rinella]

But why are you seeing. Not you, like why do you see articles where it's that they're going to be building like you know, nuclear plants to power

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

but the scale of what we're doing requires all of it. It literally.

[Steven Rinella]

So you do expect like even though you could find there's efficiencies to be found in energy production and we're generating electricity and running it through the grid and it's not being tapped and it just, you know, isn't being stored in batteries. Whatever there is going to be in our 2030 outlook, there will need to be like net new, there will generation

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

and you can ask like can we stop this from happening? And I'm not sure that we can. I think money finds a way when it's trying to get to a goal. So I think we will build quite a bit of additional generation. Utilizing the grid we have right now is just a faster way to do it because it's already built. So we are revitalizing old nuclear plants that have, you know, were built 50 years ago.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

We are putting in newer, more efficient forms of power generation, both solar and batteries as well as newer generations of gas plants, which is not necessarily a popular thing, but is going to happen. And there's all Kinds of other really interesting things happening in the energy industry. We are applying a set of pioneers that came from the oil and gas industry in fracking, are using those techniques to reimagine geothermal power so that you can. You don't have to go where there are pockets of steam already in the earth. You can go to a location and inject water. Create steam. Create the steam that spins the turbine, send that water back down in a closed loop. And again, like more water efficient.

[Steven Rinella]

Huh.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And. And the better you get at it, the more you do it, the lower your costs are. There's a company called Fervo that is kind of the darling of new geothermal.

[Steven Rinella]

That's incredible. It's like a. Like that. I'm not familiar with that concept, but it's basically you're making a steam engine, but you're using. Instead of burning coal to heat the water, you're. You're using the Earth's thermal.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's exactly right.

[Steven Rinella]

Really.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And you're using techniques and workers who came from an industry that either needs the work or needs to be transitioned into a cleaner form, but have the skills. And so that's been a popular thing. And that's. Here we are in Montana. Some of the interesting projects on that are near you. There's work being done in Utah and in Nevada, and there's work on this enhanced geothermal in Texas. There's. There's a lot going on in that you have to get the cost down, but they're actually making great progress getting the cost down.

[Steven Rinella]

Wouldn't it be interesting if. It'd be interesting if. A unexpected upside amid all the downsides. An unexpected upside is just like this. This sort of like American ideal that, you know, need driving innovation.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. I mean, that's a big theme in

[Steven Rinella]

the book that I'm working on that you're gonna get these certain, like, you're gonna. Like. For a while, you had this certain. These certain types of brains chasing renewables. Right. But now you have like a whole different class and category of humans.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

That are, like, looking at energy. Right. It'd be kind of an. It'd be like a weird irony if. If that sector. If that sector figured out maximizing renewables.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's right. And I think we'll end up. So not to scare you or your viewers here, but I think like I said earlier, we're at the beginning of this more of an industrial revolution that is catalyzed by AI. We think today of energy demand for things like chatbot prompts. But we're going into an era of physical AI where all of this high performance computing is going to be used to guide cars, guide robots in factories, make, you know, whether you like it or not, weaponry, autonomous.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure, yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

You know, change the way industrial automation makes things so that we possibly can make factories viable again. A lot of that demand and a lot of that, you know, just activity to make that happen is just barely beginning. And so we may end up just creating more energy generation to feed more applications of AI than we can imagine today. And so that's where it gets a little scary. You think about the ramp up and how this could change everything. It can bring positives and it can bring negatives. And I think one of the things that I'm trying to do is look at what, what each side wishes the other would acknowledge about both the promise and the, and the peril of what is facing us.

[Steven Rinella]

How would you put that? Like, like how would you put those two questions if you had to answer them? You know, if, if you imagine the brightest minds, like the brightest, most rational minds in the, in the anti data center movement and you say that I, and they're saying to the, and they're saying to the industry, I wish you would acknowledge. Right, and on the flip side, what is the, what is the thing you found?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, well, I would say what the energy industry would say, I wish we would all acknowledge is that the modern world runs on energy. And you can draw an upper line of, you know, prosperity and energy that's pretty much aligned. The more energy society consumes, the higher its quality of life and replacing what we. Modern life has become really convenient, so you don't even really see the power plant, you just plug your phone in. Modern life has become so convenient, you don't really understand how we get water. You just turn the faucet on, you just order stuff from Amazon. You just assume that steel is coming from somewhere to build your buildings. It's all industrial. And we assume these days that solar is just really cheap and batteries are just getting better. They are and they're improving, but they too have an environmental and industrial footprint. I mean you've got to convert raw materials to make the products they need to be recycled eventually too. Modern life is industrial and so I think that that is what in some ways the guys who have been in industry building physical things want everyone to understand and, and they want people to understand that what we've done so far has made a dent to make a greener world and planet has improved. We've improved emissions by introducing Green energy and we need to do a lot more of it. But we also, you know, we have a long way to go to decarbonize the world and it's going to take a lot of new technology, new thinking, some adaptation. And so I would say on the energy side, they're saying like the world needs more energy because we prosper with more energy. More energy is part of just progress of civilization. But we need lower emissions, we need cleaner water, we need all those things.

[Steven Rinella]

You feel the industry is asking for lower emissions and cleaner water? I mean, I feel like the industry is largely, I mean, you know, I mean let's, I mean the industry has largely given up on the green energy conversation. I mean like the main driving factors like the administrator, the, the administration, big tech, I mean, this isn't a concern of theirs anymore. It's so 2023.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

It is so 2023. I think that it could come full circle again with some of the innovation that we're seeing. The tech companies are still standing by goals that now look increasingly impossible to meet in terms of net zero by 2030 and look at the direction that they're going.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, whenever you see a 2050 or whatever, I'm like, come on.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And so then on the other side, that's where the advocates for climate action, for the environment, for health are saying, you need to acknowledge your full life cycle footprint and communities need to hear everything transparently that you are coming into a community and going to do. And there's a lot that, there's a lot of dialogue that is kind of hard to have when the two sides are at odds. But I would say the environmental groups are saying, look, Don't de emphasize. The truth is if you're backing up your data center with diesel that creates air pollution for the community, if we're all using shared water and you are adding incremental water demand, this is an issue for the community. If you are removing virgin land and wild places, we ought to have a say on it. And so it is a natural kind of back and forth that is happening right now. And it is concerning that. There's a lot of money on the pro development side. And so, you know, that's where I'm trying to kind of watch and see, you know, how is this happening? There's, you know, maybe it's a, it's a, the voice is not as loud, but there are voices within tech companies, within even guys who have been in the field developing data centers who say, look, we need to get to a place. Communities have a Lot of leverage now to ask for more. They've now realized like, hey, we're kind of a unicorn here. We've got a big pot of available power or water or what have you, and maybe our community is open to doing business with you, but we don't want to give tax incentives like we used to.

[Steven Rinella]

They realize they might have more leverage than they thought.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

More leverage? Yeah. We used to give these certain breaks to low margin industrial users that we're trying to afford to build a big car plant. This is a really different community of potential users of the land that are coming in now. And not only that, they do have technologies that can actually improve the community. So not only can they give money for a new firehouse or fix the give money for schools, they could use high performance computing and help the community figure out. And they are doing this. There are good partnerships happening with water where they're saying, if we come in, let us spend tens of millions of dollars in your community to help shore up your leaky water system and in exchange that will help us replenish more water than we're actually using at our data center. So there are things like that. There's a, a guy who was known as the conscience of the data center industry. Christian Bilotti. I've gotten to know him. He was at Microsoft. He basically coined some metrics about how efficient a data center could be. Then the latter part of his career at Microsoft, he did a lot of R and D into community positive data centers. He's now independent and working as an advisor in a lot of ways. And he says that his industry needs to think about what would make a community want the data center. He said and tells his peers, until you're willing to live next to that data center, then you haven't finished doing your job and you want it to be like, please, in my backyard. And there are some really interesting ways that he's seen infrastructure get developed. Like he often will cite, like a plant, a water desalination plant. The difference between one that was done in Australia and one was done in Singapore and the one that was done, you know, more community positive way. You know, got like a roof of grass and has, you know, all these different ways that it recycles the water that flows in the community. He's gone to places that you know are farming communities and small simple things like we will plant trees that improve the pollination in your community for your agriculture. Okay, yeah, like this industry is willing to do some of those things if you ask for them. But you know, There's a big difference between a large company that's coming in, trying to get permission, social license to operate, and then there's a lot of other just private developers that are looking for something to develop fast and flip quick.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yeah, well, it's here, folks. The 2026 Meat Eater Auction house of oddities is back and open for bids now. This year's auction features eyebrow raising outdoor gear donated by the meat eater crew, employees and friends of the brand new, including Steve's dad's shitty old truck full of badass hunting gear, the Honda outboard motor from DOS Boat Season 3, Clay Newcombe's Alaskan wetsuit, bear hide, fly fishing memorabilia from the personal collection of Lefty crate, and more. The auction house kicks off July 8 and runs for two weeks with 100% of proceeds going to our land access initiative, which to date has helped fund new public land acquisitions such as the recent 200 acre Tuckertown acquisition in North Carolina, the 328 acre Wildcat Bend acquisition in Montana, and the 215 acre Shiloh Pond project in Maine. Visit Themeateater.com auction to place your bids. Now get your hands on some meat eater history and become a meaningful part of our next public land access campaign.

[Steven Rinella]

I feel like they've done a poor job, like, well, I mean, it's kind of university accepted. They've done a very poor job of their social management of the issue for sure. And I think it's because on one hand of like pushing the radical amount of change and then also thinking that they were going to do the data center move in a lot of communities quietly. Yeah, you know, and I understand the approach you're making because I think that a lot of times people, there's an expectation that towns, villages, communities, whatever, are going to sort of like bait the hook to bring them in. And if the tide turns enough, it's going to flip that.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And rather than saying, oh, we'll give you these tax breaks, we'll give you this land, we'll give you all these incentives that you'd, that you'd play that political game enough to the point where it's like, well, why don't you tell me what you're going to do for me, right? And maybe, and maybe that switch will, you know, maybe that switch will happen. And there's so much, there's so much need that it'll, it'll push, it'll push that negotiating process in a totally different direction.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

I think that that's happening now. I think that there's, you know, Communities are understanding that the ones like ironically that got started first and are probably going to be the most economically viable because they got started first, they kind of came into being in a little earlier place where there is real competition between states for big economic projects. And so I've been traveling all over the country a lot of places, like literally for a decade. They were looking for a car manufacturing plant and had assembled a big megaproject site and couldn't. They were like second and third and

[Steven Rinella]

trying to lure in the plant and

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

they lost it again and again and again. And when data centers came along, there's a rival and they know who their rivals are. And they know maybe it's Wisconsin versus Indiana, maybe it's Louisiana versus Mississippi. And so they didn't want to lose it. And they offered incentives, which in retrospect, maybe they needed them at the time or they certainly were intending to bring business economic prosperity to their state. But there's a lot of things when we look with hindsight later at this era.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, like they maybe made some bad deals.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Hey, maybe we should have done it this way instead.

[Steven Rinella]

Are you seeing that when you talk to people?

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. I mean, I've talked with mayors who say, boy, I would have asked for even more had I realized how much leverage I have. And the, you know, and some things are getting retraded. You know, Microsoft came to a community in Indiana and said, we'd actually like to give you a better financial deal. And it has to do with the way that they've structured taxes and it gave a lot more money to the school system right away. And they just came back and said, this is more in keeping with what we're doing now. So it's kind of a give and take. But what we're going up to is data center backlash has gotten worse. I think part of it is people have facts about their town and fears that it's just really hard to separate the truth from the noise. And sometimes the truth is not good either. And so we're going to have an election cycle where I just wrote a column about this where I was talking with a political consultant who said, if you are running a governor's race, he was speaking of a specific state, but I think it's broader than that. And you're a Republican or a Democrat, you can't really be four AI data centers or you have to be demanding a new policy on how the power gets done or how it works.

[Steven Rinella]

Man, that, that's funny you mentioned that. For me, for me to get behind a politician State level politician. If their, if their deal was, if they're sort of, if, if their take on it was, I'm going to do everything in my power to bring data centers to our state, in my mind, they're out.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It doesn't need to be that they're going to do everything in their power to prevent it, but they would have to like articulate a level of skepticism and a level of negotiating prowess about how this was going to go down. And then if it happens, it's going to be good for us. Like, I would, I would have to hear it. So it doesn't surprise me to hear that just across the country you have to be like a. I don't know what the best word for it. You have to be like maybe at least a data center skeptic, you know, because really the thing that, like the thing that makes me pay attention is, is. And it sounds trite, like, I don't want to look at it.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't want to look at it. You know, when I look out, I like to see things like, like green, how God made it, wildlife habitat, you know, I mean, like, I like, I don't like to, I don't want to look out and see it. And so it would take a lot. And there's this sense that, like, there's a sense that even if there's tons of resistance, I'm not, I'm not going to see it in my laptop.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you follow me? Like, there could be like, it's never gonna be like I'm gonna, I'm never gonna try to use Google, you know, drive. Right. And realize, ah, there's no. I just know it'll resolve itself.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And so the, the resistance part of it, like the resistance to data center part of it never feels real to me. Like it's going to cost me.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And so maybe that's a paradigm shift that will need to happen where people start seeing like some way that like, if we resist this all the time, we're going to lose out on a global scale or we're going to lose out on some geopolitical scale. But I think that people would have to see it first because there's plenty of people that hate data centers that are probably organizing their anti data center activities with cloud computing and using social

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

media algorithms to elevate.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, not probably.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They definitionally are. The anti data center movement is driven by data centers. So.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

That's. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

But Americans are comfortable with that kind of. Americans are comfortable with that kind of Hypocrisy.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

They are. And we do face some risks as we think about where the world could go. It has become very difficult to build infrastructure in this country, and we're in desperate need of a better power grid, depending on which side of the political aisle you walk down. We're in desperate need of more transmission and we're in desperate need of more natural gas pipelines, both of which are considered, quote, linear infrastructure. They go through people's land, one is buried. So maybe neither one are easy to get through.

[Podcast Announcer]

Okay.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And so we're at a moment where there's maybe some bipartisan discussion about whether we make that easier. From what I've seen of some polls, like, people do find the threat of China and AI enabled warfare to still be abstract. And if they're in a community where it was pastoral, maybe it was pastoral because the factories closed and they just became cornfields again. But. But they see their community first and don't want it to change with so much else changing. And so the truth is that China has built a grid that's triple our size. And they've been powering manufacturing all this time that we've been doing less manufacturing. Right. So their grid is super modern. It is capable of ramping up for whatever it may be, economic, wartime. They've got a grid that is quite capable. And they've got a burgeoning advanced manufacturing sector. We're not talking cheap toys and furniture. We're talking batteries, automated factories. We're talking about, you know, all the different elements of green energy that, you know, require solar panels, but robotics, all of this advanced manufacturing. Now there's an effort to bring it back here. Guess what? That uses more energy and that, you know, will have an additional industrial footprint besides data centers. And they will use data centers to run them.

[Steven Rinella]

That's. Man, that's the thing I always think about, is I used to work on this theory and I never got it worked out good. It was kind of like an environmental nationalism and it's, it's full of holes. But this environmental nationalism I envisioned would be that it's as immature as it might sound. It would be this idea that our play, our play would be to harness resources like environmental degradation that other nations are comfortable doing.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And that we would reap the benefits of that, but leave our stuff clean and pristine. I never got all the details worked out, but I was, I was trying to.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Haven't we done that?

[Steven Rinella]

We, we do do that. We do that. And it would. We do. We do that to quite a degree. And it would be the thing that was brought up all the time when people were. I was talking about your heart rate on your kids.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

To turn the lights off and be like all these things in the US around being efficient with energy and clean coal and all this. And you look, but you're like, but there's still India.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

No, we've out still China.

[Steven Rinella]

It'd be like, you can do all this stuff, it doesn't matter. Because there's these things you can't control that are out there. And so in some way we benefit from it. But I think that if you looked and said like, sure, man, maybe in China they don't have a movement of people that has the freedom and liberty and autonomy to resist the government right, to resist industry. Industry is king. The government is king. Human, like citizens have no voice. They get steamrolled. Their stuff all gets turned in to data centers. Right up until the point when we're like, up until the point where we're fighting a war with China. And if we're fighting a war with China, even if it's a proxy war through Taiwan or whatever, we're fighting a war with China. And then we say to ourselves, man, we shouldn't have just let it be that they were doing it all and we weren't doing it because now we're at odds, you know, and it's, it's a, like, I don't know, it's a tricky one. It's a tricky one when I imagine a, you know, a natural, beautiful landscape with clean air, clean water, and like healthy wildlife populations and like, you know, just a place you love to be and love to look out versus this distant threat that we're gonna get bested by another country in a way that is gonna ultimately impede our freedom. And I think that you have to, you know, and looking at all this, it's like a, it's a really complicated gamble everybody has to make.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. And you, you ask, well, can, you know, is there a way to do that and have fewer regrets? And so I just wrote about this event I attended where a bunch of Silicon Valley founders had rushed to Detroit for the sole purpose of discussing and showing how we can re industrialize America using their technology. Right. Making factories and industrial basis work differently, using technology to make critical medical processing cleaner and bringing it here. Because if we're a society that no longer makes things and just a service economy and we're dependent on the powers that do make things, that doesn't leave us in a very good position. But what you love and what we all love, wild America and the. The scenery just outside of this podcast studio. It is what our country, what makes our country so majestic. And so what are some attempts to have industry and progress and think more about the natural landscape? And there are models that are starting to emerge that make better choices. There are AI data centers that are being built in desert prairie in Texas that will primarily be run off the grid on solar and batteries with some natural gas power to firm it. When it's not sunny or windy, if there's wind and it's using some kind of flexible gas power that uses less water, does that mean that that's the way you can do it everywhere? No. Certain regions allow you to reimagine an industrial factory like a data center, which really is an industrial factory. Other places you might have water, but you don't have the power. And maybe people. And to build it, you can't put a burden on people. What I found so interesting is we've got the richest industry in the world trying to take from the power system. And it's also the case that there are people living in dire conditions who can't run their dialysis machine or their asthma machine and they can't afford their power bill. Like, we're sharing that same, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is sharing that system with that human being who needs, you know, whose very subsistence depends on being able to afford their power bill. So are there some ways that we can all fit ourselves onto the planet together? Like, you would like to hope so. And you know that there will be mistakes along the way. But back to your point about the way the country allows us to be messy and free and, you know, do what we want with our property rights, it is a different way to arrive at the answer than to have it be centrally planned from the Chinese Communist Party. And so. And it's the way our country's. This is how it's unfolding. We have opposition, we have proponents. They're both trying to make each other more honest. Hopefully they will. That's America, I guess.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah. If you had to crystal ball it. When you look at this kind of closing question for you, if you have to crystal ball it. When we first started talking, we talked about that 2030 projection.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah, right.

[Steven Rinella]

Will opposition, if you crystal ball that, will opposition to data centers block that projection? Or do you think that it's like, it's like where there's a will, there's a way. Like, it'll happen. It'll happen in. It might move, but that's gonna happen.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

I think it's gonna happen more in certain regions of the country than others.

[Steven Rinella]

So we'll shift where it happens, but it will happen.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

We'll shift where it's allowed to happen. There will be some of these projects built where people aren't happy with it, and I think that could make it a less happy outcome. So I think, for example, you'll end up seeing more of it come to Texas. You're already seeing that now. Not because Texas is rolling over. Actually, Texas is an interesting case because they have their own grid, their own grid sheriffs, they've been very strict, saying, here's how we want it to happen. But they've always been more of a pro development state.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

But I think it's gonna take a few years for the mess and the dust of building to clear.

[Steven Rinella]

And

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

some places may seem like white elephants and others we may just get used to them and then start to take them for granted. Like we have other aspects of our industrial and digital life already or our energy supply already. And it's up to all the innovators to try to do it with a better footprint so that we.

[Steven Rinella]

I oftentimes try to explain to my kids the Y2K phenomenon, the panic that wasn't meaning. There's things that, like, history's full of this. American history spoils this. There's things like this that come and it's like, so shocking.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then later people look and later generations in the previous generations have to explain like, no, you don't understand, man. This was like, when this happened, this was a big deal. It was a big deal. And they're just like, yeah, right. Picture what we were going through in the 40s and 50s with nuclear energy.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And nuclear armament.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. And building the plants in the 70s.

[Steven Rinella]

My kids will. They will never understand the amount of soul searching and the amount of public debate, the careers that were won and lost, the books that were written about, is this the right move? Should we go down this path? It'll just be that that's what it. That's how the world is.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah. There were debates like that about, you know, coal mining and, you know, the early oil boom. A lot of it was up in Pennsylvania. And it definitely changed the landscape and to some degree benefited the cities closer to the coast. But it also created communities of laborers and points of pride that led to the Steel Age.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, I mentioned that it's a NIMBY fight. It almost like accentuates it almost makes it why it needs to be A NIMBY fight would be that a citizen says, I accept that it's coming. This is all inevitable. The only thing I can really do here is I can make it that it's not right there. Like, that's the only, you know, if I can do that, if I can make it not across the road from my house, I accept the rest and that'll be my fight.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, and it'll probably be how this continues to play out. They're like, I get it, you're all gonna do it. Don't do it right there. Right.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And who will be happier? It's an interesting question. The ones that don't get any of it, the ones that get way too much of it, you know, it's, it comes with trade offs.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that was the thing I was going to ask you about, but then I thought it'd just be such wild speculation is I was going to ask you about, do you think that some of these cities, states, whatever, that make it prohibitive to build data centers, that in 10 years, 20 years, they're going to look at it like how Portland, when Portland made hard drugs legal, and then a while later they were like, my God, can you believe that was the dumbest thing we've ever done? Right. That down the road, states cities will be like, dude, we shouldn't have driven those people away. Now look at all the prosperity these other, these other cities are having. And we like screwed ourselves. And now, you know, I don't know,

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

I think it could be a big contrast between the communities that did and the communities that didn't. And I think you're going to have different people either feeling regret or satisfaction. Like anyone whose job it is to figure out how you're going to, you know, fund a municipal budget is going to say, wow, I really could use that tax revenue.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

You know, it kicks in. You know, there have been tax breaks, don't get me wrong. But you know, some of those start to, you know, expire, and then the property value of these data centers could be enormous. If you listen to tech and what they think they can do, make off of them, then you realize that the tax base of some of these communities could go up hundreds of percent, you know, by multiples. And, and that pays for a lot, including helping communities that are struggling.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, the human mind doesn't really work that way though. If down the road they're like, you're closing a school. No one's gonna say, like, damn it, we should have let the data center come, you know, What? I mean, people's heads don't work that way. Yeah, well. And Davis Vaughn, thanks for coming on the show. People that want to follow this as it plays out, and it's happening so fast. There's so much going on all the time. And does a column@the information.com every two weeks.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

You have a column every two weeks? It's behind a paywall, but it's worth it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I have really enjoyed your reporting on it. Appreciate you coming down.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

And I posted on LinkedIn so you can always get the gist of what I'm writing.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, perfect. Okay. So Ann Davis Vaughn. Last name V A U G H, N. Look forward to V A U

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

G H A N. What did I just say? Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, I spelled it wrong. I'm sorry.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Spelled again, it's V A U G H A N. Oh, I'm sorry. No worries.

[Steven Rinella]

V A U G H A N. This is pronounced Vaughn, though.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Vaughn.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. I didn't screw that up, right? And looked for the. Look for the book, which will hopefully probably be titled Gigawatt. And again, it's a book about the AI industrial boom and how it is reshaping the energy industry, the industrial landscape in the American heartland. Thanks for coming on.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

Thank you so much for having me, Steven.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, Nate Mason is back there flagging me the TRCP deal. Just hang tight a minute. This has nothing to do with AI. Every year we do. We do our trcp. Our TRCP Turkey Hunt giveaway, where we raise money for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Giannis, we've been doing this many years now. Giannis and I take a. It's a raffle. We take the winner and a guest and we take them on a turkey hunt. We cover airfare, lodging. Last year we brought in a buddy of mine who's a professional chef to cook. We cover all expenses, turkey tag, everything. We take you turkey hunting two days, three nights. We have a great time. We got a super good spot lined up for next spring. We took our guys there this spring. Everybody got their turkeys the first day. It's a great time. If you want to do it, go to trcp.org look for the summer fundraiser. And. And again, all the expenses are covered. So when you buy raffle tickets, every dime of that raffle ticket goes to TRCP. And TRCP's slogan is guaranteeing Americans quality places to hunt and fish. So support trcp. Enter the raffle for the Turkey Hunt giveaway, hosted by me and Janice Pugilist, the Latvian eagle. Thanks, everyone.

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

This is Mandy Woodruff. Santos from Brown Ambition when you think about discovering small brands, what store pops into your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously, Walmart has thousands of small brands and they're all in one place. Just go online or in store, discover and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind it. They're true American success stories and you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small [e-mail] today.

[Steven Rinella]

Hunting demands preparation, persistence and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise. Gear. Built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry leading merino wool keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements, First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters for hunters with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses, just gear you can count on. Head to firstlight.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com this

[Ann Davis Vaughn]

is an I Heart podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

Guaranteed human.