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Two years ago, we devoted an entire issue to the rise of the American oligarchy. Since then, our oligarchic system has become more entrenched and pervasive, revolving around a small crew of tech titans whose quest for wealth and power—in all of its forms—is destabilizing our democracy and reshaping our society. In the May + June 2026 issue, we investigate our new AI overlords and the world they are striving to create, whether we like it or not. Read the rest of the package here. 

One of the largest data center projects ever proposed covers a roughly 5.7-square-mile stretch of farmland in the Louisiana Delta hamlet of Holly Ridge. When it is finally completed at a cost of $27 billion—if it is finally completed—it will house 11 buildings and hundreds of thousands of GPUs and produce enough electricity to power New Orleans three times over. The project, named Hyperion after a Titan from Greek mythology, will “unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg declared in a Facebook post after returning from President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025—which is another way of saying it may someday power chatbots. The site, he boasted, “is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.” To underscore the point, Zuckerberg helpfully attached an illustration: a jagged lavender rectangle, stretching from the bottom of Harlem to the top of SoHo.

But the thing about building a data center this big is you cannot simply build a data center—you must build a world to go with it. You need three new power plants and transmission lines to connect them to the grid. You need hundreds of millions of gallons of water and miles of pipes. You must pave roads and build new ones, clear fields, and build ponds. You need a port to bring in gravel and dirt from wherever you can get it. You need stoplights and sheriff’s deputies and laundromats. You need thousands of workers and places to house them—executive lodging, cheap motels, and man camps with movie theaters and gyms. Pecan groves will become RV lots; homes will become parking lots or a Dollar General or food truck parks.

When I visited Holly Ridge last November, nearly a year after the project was first announced, the surrounding parish was ­experiencing a speculative frenzy. It felt like everything that had not already flipped was on the market—and everyone who had not sold out or been priced out was cashing in or thinking about it.

If the economic story of the last two decades was the consolidation of wealth and power in Silicon Valley, the story of the last few years is what tech billionaires want to do with it. Since the summer of 2024, America’s richest men have been on a building spree with few precedents in recent history. The scale of the investment, in the hopes of winning the race to create artificial general intelligence (or AGI), is so vast that proponents have turned to previous eras of reckless extraction and technological advancement to describe it. Energy Secretary Chris Wright called it “Manhattan Project 2.” It is one of the largest investments of private capital since the transcontinental railroads. Expenditures for AI data centers amounted to about a quarter of all GDP growth in the first half of 2025, with the largest companies collectively spending $400 billion on construction projects—many of which won’t be fully operational for years.

Data centers have replaced megayachts as the preferred theater of oligarchic status signaling. Instead of submarines and retractable dance floors, these billionaires tout their compute, their gigawatts, and their acreage. The largest of the new facilities, the so-called “hyperscale” sites where AI models are to be trained, come with names that reflect the pathologies of their founders. Sam Altman’s Stargate in Abilene, Texas, will be “roughly the size of New York’s Central Park,” according to Bloomberg—while OpenAI’s Project ­Jupiter site in New Mexico could be larger still. Amazon and Anthropic are developing Project Rainier on 1,200 acres outside South Bend, Indiana. Elon Musk trained his Mein Kampf–loving chatbot, Grok, at Memphis’ Colossus 1. Colossus 2 is on the other side of town. The names evoke both ancient and contemporary mythology; in D.F. Jones’ science fiction trilogy, ­Colossus is the rogue AI that enslaves mankind. (Grok, for its part, has described itself as “MechaHitler.”) Both Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have AI projects called­ ­Prometheus. There are at least five AI companies named for Icarus.

A black-and-white aerial photo of four two-story homes. Behind them, separated by a few trees, are multiple large warehouse-style buildings.
A housing development near data centers in Sterling, Virginia.Stephen Voss

These futuristic fantasies are being planted on the ruins of the past. Open­AI is sourcing data center parts from the Ohio plant where union autoworkers once made Pontiac Firebirds. (Full disclosure: The ­Center for Investigative Reporting is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.) Meta is building another hyperscale campus in the master-­planned community where Jeffrey Epstein once lived. A company called Patmos installed a data center in the building where the Kansas City Star was once printed. Microsoft is reopening Three Mile Island, and developers are renovating robber baron–era steel mills for server farms. A mock-up of a rebuilt Gaza City pitched to the Trump administration by a group of Israeli businessmen envisioned an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone” next to a cluster of data centers, tailored to meet US AI regulations—of which, I’m pleased to report, there are vanishingly few. Then Jared Kushner unveiled a similar plan at Trump’s Board of Peace signing ceremony at Davos.

Across the country, third-party agents are stalking bean fields on behalf of anonymous buyers, making big promises about tax revenue and jobs in exchange for a still bigger quantity of water and power. Utilities are keeping coal plants online. The White House is slashing regulations on nuclear safety. Demand for gas turbines to power these facilities is so high that there is a backlog until 2030, and people like Musk are importing power plants from overseas piece by piece, like Italian relics in the Gilded Age. The gold rush is driving a relentless demand for energy (which will nearly triple within the industry by 2030), real estate (nearly 2 billion square feet and counting), and investor cash ($1.6 trillion by 2030). When did you suspect it was a bubble? Maybe it was when former Energy Secretary Rick Perry became the face of a $15 billion project in Amarillo named for Enrico Fermi. Maybe it was when Altman literally said it was.

The AI boom has ushered oligarchy onto a new plane by uniting the monopolistic ambitions of the world’s richest men with the nationalist ambitions of their political champions. In the process, it has sparked a reckoning, in big towns and small and across the political spectrum, over the demand for resources and tax dollars and over what kind of future we might build—about who gets to decide to bet the house and whose chips are simply fodder for the pot. The data centers have, in a sense, transformed opaque structures of inequality and power into literal ones. Oligarchy is now more than an idea; it is a place. Across the country, the empire builders of AI have sold themselves as the gateway to the future you’ve always dreamed of, and the solution to the problems they helped bring about. I hit the road because I wanted to see what this historic disruption was doing to the communities it was purporting to level up. The only thing more disruptive than if the oligarchs are right might be what happens if they’re wrong.

It is no longer novel or even particularly accurate to note that the richest Americans control a greater share of resources than they did during the Gilded Age.

They are about three times wealthier.

That wealth is increasingly concentrated in a single industry, consumed by a singular purpose.

Land is cleared for the Stargate data center project in Abilene, Texas.Stephen Voss

When I rolled into Abilene one evening in August, a few weeks before the first machines powered on at OpenAI and Oracle’s joint venture, the parking lot of the Super 8 motel outside of town was filled with trucks, splattered with red clay. The woman at the front desk just laughed when I asked if they’d gotten much business from the data center’s construction. A smoke detector was going off next door and my room smelled like cigarettes; the nightly rate had nearly doubled. Signs advertising short-term housing and RV rentals lined the roads. On a Sunday afternoon, when the rest of the city shut down, crew after crew, in black boots and blue jeans, emptied out of pickups and four-wheelers to grab energy drinks and snacks at the nearest gas station. It was 99 degrees.

The shock of what Trump calls “big, beautiful buildings” is not that their footprint is so unlike anything you have ever seen—from the outside, data centers resemble nothing more futuristic than souped-up fulfillment centers or a series of airplane hangars—but that all these plants are simply there, where nothing once was. “This is the unicorn that comes, like, once in a billion years,” the then–city manager explained when a plan to build data centers on the site first came up for a vote in 2021. “I feel like it was an invasion,” a neighbor told local officials a few years after that—as though a “monstrosity” of “concrete palaces” had simply risen out of the plains.

Altman, who has a propensity for delivering grandiose statements about his industry in the soft-spoken and reflective tone of a philosophy student confessing to a murder, once told the New Yorker, “If I weren’t in on this, I’d be, like, ‘Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?’” This is a pretty good description of what it was like to attend a local planning meeting in America in 2025. According to Data Center Watch, a newsletter published by an industry intelligence firm, an estimated $98 billion in projects were paused or canceled in the face of community opposition in the second quarter of last year alone. Opponents have blocked major deals in Tucson, Arizona; Indianapolis; New Brunswick, New Jersey; and Prince William County, Virginia. In February, protesters fed up with data centers filled the rotunda of the ­Minnesota State Capitol.

Hyperscale projects have galvanized everyone from singer SZA (“AI is killing and polluting black and brown cities. None of you care cause your [sic] codependent on a machine. Have a great life”) to Dale Earnhardt’s son Kerry, who helped defeat a proposal to turn the Intimidator’s North Carolina land into a technology park, and then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who argued that their spread would hasten the arrival of Skynet. Angry ratepayers helped power Democratic sweeps in Virginia and New Jersey last fall.

There is a whole lot of NIMBYism packed into these local fights, often in the most literal kind of way. Arguments about traffic and the character of the community are not unique to the AI boom. But I’ve listened to hours and hours of community meetings, in towns across the country, and you can hear in this opposition a reckoning with something more profound, too. At a county commissioners meeting in Indiana, an attorney for an anonymous developer promised that a $12 billion data center in the town of New Carlisle would be “laid out in a way to be bucolic.” Speaker after speaker threw the word back in his face. New Carlisle already had an $11 billion data center. They knew what it looked like. What New Carlisle didn’t need, one Hoosier told her county commissioners, was to give away its power and water for a technology that would “radicalize our teenagers to be hateful and dangerous or suicidal.” This is not the kind of person who can be swayed by Altman’s promise of ­erotica on demand.

The facelessness of the buildings is a symbol for the coldness of the corporations themselves. “Why should I trust this company that doesn’t trust themselves enough to let me know who you are?” asked a woman at a meeting in Menomonie, ­Wisconsin, where a $1.6 billion, 300-plus-acre data center was proposed. Another speaker found it suspicious that the anonymous buyer was headquartered in the “tax shelter” of Delaware.

When I asked Timothy Accola about the proposed project in his Menomonie backyard, he quickly set me straight: “Front yard, really.” Accola, a 38-year-old microbiologist with bushy sideburns like a Civil War general, lives with a Great Dane named Hamlet on the edge of town. He recently installed solar panels and tends a small orchard—peaches, cherries, apples, plums. “I was planning,” he told me, “on staying there the rest of my life.”

But in July, he got back from a work trip to find a letter in his mailbox from the city, alerting him that his neighbors’ farm was poised to become a data center. Accola’s opposition, he admits, carries a strong whiff of self-­interest. He dreads the light and noise from a facility that must operate 24 hours a day and believes the proposal has “ruined any sort of value that my property has on a domestic sale market.” But his concerns went deeper.

At a community meeting later that summer, Accola told the city council that he had been reading up about data centers on Reddit and listening to a lot of Ed Zitron—the acerbic tech podcaster who has emerged as perhaps the foremost chronicler of the flimsy finances and false promises of the AI bubble.

“This thing is going to pop. Is it going to pop before or after they finish building this place? Anybody have a realistic answer on that?” he asked. “What are we going to do then when there’s a 5-million-square-foot facility in this field that is absolutely empty?”

Other residents at the meeting invoked Foxconn, whose boondoggle on the other side of the state had produced a tenth of its promised 13,000 jobs after the state offered $3 billion in incentives. (Recently, a new tenant set up shop in the industrial footprint: Microsoft data centers.) Politicians in Oregon have shelled out billions of dollars in incentives to lure data centers. But at one Google site in The Dalles, according to the Oregonian, an offer of $260 million in incentives and a third of the city’s 2024 water supply had resulted in just 200 full-time jobs—many of them off-site.

The same narratives pop up again and again. Communities are essentially given a choice: Approve it fast or watch some other town reap the rewards—and miss out on future investments. (In the end, local officials decided to block both the Menomonie and New Carlisle projects, at least for now.) The anxiety on display in public meetings across the country is over not just what happens if all of these get built, but the very real possibility that many of them will not. There is a long-standing fear, in big towns and small, of a giant company coming in and swallowing up everything else, ­because that’s what so much of their experience of American capitalism has been. But there’s something even worse than getting another Walmart, and it’s being promised a Walmart and getting only a Spirit Halloween.

A tightly cropped black-and-white photo of a tear in the mesh that lines a chain-link fence. Through the rip, a large wall for a data center can be seen being stood up with a crane and braces.
A data center under construction near a baseball field in Herndon, Virginia.Stephen Voss

The rise of the American oligarchy happened slowly and then all at once. If you were plotting inequality on a chart, you’d see a steady upward slope from Clinton-­era deregulation to Bush-era tax cuts to Obama-era techno-optimism and on through Trump’s first term. Then it spiked. Between 2000 and 2020, as tech monopolies consolidated power, the share of the nation’s wealth held by the top 0.00001 percent roughly doubled. By the end of 2025, it had nearly doubled again. It is no longer novel or even particularly accurate to note that the richest Americans control a greater share of resources than they did during the Gilded Age; they are, according to French economist Gabriel Zucman, about three times wealthier. That wealth is increasingly concentrated in a single industry, consumed by a singular purpose.

The American oligarchy is an AI oligarchy. Musk’s net worth has tripled since the 2024 election, to well north of $800 ­billion, according to Forbes, with a new pay package approved by Tesla shareholders poised to make him the ­first-ever trillionaire. The world’s six richest men as of early March were all ­actively involved in AI development; the seventh was Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, whose chips prop up this entire system. There are 10 trillion-dollar companies, and nine of them are in AI.

You don’t have to be an AI hater to think critically about where this is headed. My reporting process for this piece was aided by an AI transcription product that saved weeks of my life. My colleagues have used AI to decipher thousands of Reconstruction-­era Freedmen’s Bureau ­records. Maybe you like vibe coding. Maybe you’ve fallen in love with Claude. But even if the programs being trained at these big, beautiful buildings overcome a propensity for hallucinations and abuse and elevate us to a new level of consciousness, the greatest disruption of this era may be the trade-off it took to get here.

Once the realm of Marxists, madmen, and the French, the manifesto has found new purchase in recent years as the preferred artistic medium of AI’s emperor class, surpassing even the product launch. Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” presaged Big Tech’s great schism with liberalism. Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace” signposted Anthropic as the wokest of the would-be world builders—a company that would still do business with an autocratic Gulf state, but without sounding quite so enthusiastic about it. Zuckerberg’s “Personal Superintelligence,” published in the plain-text style of an early 2000s blog post, begins with a line that sounds like the last known transmission from the crew of a spaceship: “Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves.” Altman’s first effort was titled “Moore’s Law for Everything,” and it holds up five years later as a cipher for all that’s followed.

The title refers to the proposition—more a catechism than a tenet of science—that the processing power of cutting-edge computer chips will double every two years. Altman extended that concept to society more broadly, arguing that the compounding progress of AI could, if channeled properly, raise the global standard of living and usher in a new age of abundance. We were entering the Burj Khalifa part of the exponential curve. “‘Moore’s Law for everything’ should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can’t afford what they want,” ­Alt­man wrote at the dawn of this new era. “It sounds utopian, but it’s something technology can deliver.” To which I would simply ask: Does all of this feel utopian?

Altman drew inspiration from the work of Henry George, an economist who operated in an era of industrial transformation to which the data center boom is frequently analogized. George wrote in 1868 that the railroad “kills little towns and builds up cities, and in the same way kills little businesses and builds up great ones.” The first transcontinental route, he predicted, would produce staggering inequality unless new mechanisms were introduced to redistribute its riches. George’s solution, which nearly got him elected mayor of New York, was to tax the value of land instead of labor. Altman proposed a land value tax and a universal basic income—disbursed as annual dividends from the government’s stake in AI companies.

But George did not get what he wanted, and Altman has mostly moved on. In July, not long after publishing a new manifesto called “The Gentle Singularity,” he told podcaster Theo Von (they met at Trump’s inauguration) that “I used to be really excited about things like UBI—I still am kind of excited,” but that simply collecting a check was not going to “feel good.” Instead, Altman now proposed giving everybody on Earth “a slice of the world’s AI capacity,” because “I think what people really want is the agency to kind of co-create the future together.”

In the recent past, the agency to kind of co-create the future was called politics. But there, too, Altman’s thoughts have evolved, in tandem with those of his fellow titans. Although OpenAI was founded on the promise of developing the nascent technology in a thoughtful and sort of utilitarian way—and Altman still goes around saying things like, “We need to level up humans” and “We don’t really know what role money will play in a post-AGI world”—the conversations that AI proponents are having in public right now tell a simpler and less idealistic story: The people who claim to be building the future traded the dream of democratic abundance for a strongman who will make them money.

In September, a few dozen tech luminaries gathered at the White House to promote first lady Melania Trump’s initiative to encourage children to use AI. The ulterior motive for the summit came into focus at a dinner in the residence later that evening, when the president called on the AI moguls one by one to say a few words about their work. You could hear a dull clattering of silverware in the background.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” said OpenAI President Greg Brockman, for the administration’s “optimism.”

“Thank you for being such a pro-­business, pro-innovation president—it’s a very refreshing change,” said Altman.

“Thank you for incredible leadership,” said Bill Gates.

“Thank you so much for bringing us all together, and the policies that you have put in place for the United States to lead,” said Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.

“Thank you for setting the tone,” said Apple’s Tim Cook.

It’s not just the chatbots, it turns out, that tend toward sycophancy. This was the kind of scene that a lesser autocrat might have kept off camera but that Trump found value in showing to the world. The AI executives offered him ballroom donations, settlement checks, and legitimacy. He offered them deals, deregulation, and deference. It was important that everyone understand the arrangement.

This alliance stemmed not just from convenience, but a shared sense of purpose. For years, Silicon Valley harbored a nascent insecurity about its Social ­Network era. There was a belief (not at all wrong) that so much venture capital cash had been wasted on frivolous things and that the industry promoted cosmopolitan decadence in place of nationalism. Google did business in China, but not with the Pentagon. The manifesto for the Founders Fund, the venture capital group Peter Thiel helped found, lamented, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 Characters”—an argument that so radicalized Vice President JD Vance, it led to a religious conversion.

Wealth is increasingly concentrated in a single industry, consumed by a singular purpose. The American oligarchy is an AI oligarchy.

Now the pendulum has swung the other way. When Vance, in a speech to tech investors last year, declared, “We are a nation of builders,” he was deliberately echoing yet another manifesto—Andreessen’s pandemic-era “It’s Time to Build,” which urged conservatives to offer “uncompromised political support…for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.” It’s not as if the Biden administration had been especially hostile to AI development. It had pushed semiconductor manufacturing onshore and cheered on the hyperscale age. The data center boom started on his watch. But Trump offered the embrace of nationalism and the stench of carbon.

The AI boom fused the administration’s desire to protect its “civilization” with Big Tech’s desire to build a better one. Zuckerberg—sporting Caesar curls and Meta glasses—has styled himself as an Augustinian world builder out to “advance the frontier.” He teamed up with Palmer Luckey, the Facebook exile turned AI weapons developer, on a Pentagon project to “turn warfighters into technomancers.” Amazon Web Services secured its largest-ever contract with Customs and Border Protection. The new ambassador to Denmark, tasked with acquiring Greenland in the service of Trump’s expansionism, helped launch the Founders Fund. Thiel, of course, helped pick Vance. The administration’s AI czar, David Sacks, was once Thiel’s chief operating officer at PayPal and is now an AI investor. When MTG complained about Skynet, she was responding to an amendment that would restrict states’ ability to regulate AI; Sacks wrote an executive order that did just that.

This embrace of technological supremacy in the service of the “homeland” is at once a new vision of politics and a very old one. In July, as the Department of Homeland Security deployed Silicon Valley’s finest surveillance tools against immigrants and their defenders, the agency took a break from posting AI slop and white nationalist lyrics to share a 150-year-old artwork by John Gast. The painting, titled American Progress, is a celebration of manifest destiny. The left side of the image shows Native Americans and bison retreating ­toward the edge of the canvas. The right side reveals the technological advancement displacing them: three railroads, steaming inland across the continent.

A person is dwarfed standing amid tall concrete walls being erected for a data center.
A data center under construction in Gainesville, Virginia.Stephen Voss

The implicit promise of the AI revolution is that all the things made worse by AI will eventually be fixed by AI. Some oligarchs are even pitching AI as a solution to the problems oligarchy has helped bring about. Zuckerberg recently suggested that his chatbots would alleviate a crisis of digital disconnection. The average American has “fewer than three friends,” he said, but demand for “like, 15”—a remarkable statement from the protagonist of The Social Network. Prompted by Trump to explain how Stargate would “help us with the fight against the various problems,” Altman suggested that the AI trained in Abilene would “cure diseases at a rapid rate.” But Trump’s second term has been one long crash course on the difference between can and will. Millions of people will die of things we already know how to prevent because Musk threw global health funding “into the wood chipper.” We have entered the Burj Kha­lifa part of the measles curve. If there’s one thing the lords of the algorithm ought to understand, it’s that outputs are a product of the values you put in.

Whereas Russia’s kleptocrats started off in extractive mineral industries and then branched out into tech and finance, America’s oligarchs made their fortunes online before pivoting to natural resources. Musk built a lithium refinery in Texas and has talked about starting a mining company. An Altman startup is partnering with the US government on a plutonium project. Tech billionaires were early investors in a venture to harvest rare-earth minerals in Greenland. Above all else, these AI barons are gobbling up land and industrial sites and hoarding fossil fuels. Facebook did not become a metaverse company; it has become an energy company.

The amount of power needed to keep the data center boom going is astounding. An analysis by Accenture projected that by 2030, energy demand for data centers would be equivalent to that of the entire country of Canada, and the industry’s share of global emissions could jump elevenfold. Another study projected that data center use would account for roughly 12 percent of all US electricity consumption in that same time frame, up threefold from the start of the boom. In Virginia, where 42 percent of all government incentives over a 10-year period went to server farms, data centers already account for a quarter of the state’s power demand, using an amount of energy equivalent to about 2 million households. In Indiana, the drive for energy sources on a grid stressed by Google and Amazon facilities has kept coal-fired power plants online and put a strain on everything else.

Timothy Accola’s neighbors in Menomonie who worried about their electric bills were not just speculating aimlessly. A study by two Harvard Law School researchers found that consumers would end up paying billions to underwrite tech companies’ power infrastructure—to say nothing of billions of dollars in tax breaks. A CNBC ­analysis found 16 states doled out $6 billion worth of tax breaks over the last five years. In New Jersey, the AI expansion drove a 22 percent hike in electric rates year over year.

All this dirty energy means that, as with public health, oligarchy is slowing our progress on climate. While Trump touts the promise of an AI that cures cancer, his agencies are rolling back clean air regulations designed to help prevent people from getting it. (Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency helpfully no longer considers the impact on human lives when setting air pollution limits.) One recent study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Riverside, found that the increased power use by the AI industry would produce about $20 billion in public health damages by 2028, equivalent to the entire car and truck emissions of California and “double that of US coal-based steelmaking.”

Companies that once branded themselves as the vanguard of the climate revolution have rediscovered the wonders of ­carbon. Ketan Joshi, an independent energy analyst who has tracked how leading tech companies are talking about their climate targets now, drew my attention to a recent update from Microsoft on the status of its sustainability “moonshot.”

“The moon,” the company announced, “has gotten further away.”

Gas turbines stand in a row. The sky above is distorted by rising heat haze.
The xAI data center in Memphis. It attracted controversy after it was reported that the company was using portable gas turbines without proper permits.Stephen Voss

It’s possible, if you look in the right place, to actually see these visions of progress burning up before your eyes. On a ­Sunday morning last fall, I drove my rental car through the west side of Memphis, past a Valero ­refinery and a Tennessee ­Valley ­Authority plant and so many railyards, until I reached a long gray building with earthmovers scattered around the exterior and rows of identical Cybertrucks in the parking lot. This is ­MechaHitler’s bunker.

Colossus 1, the first of three xAI facilities in and around Memphis, embodied the build-at-any-cost mindset that was propelling the hyperscale boom and the commingling of corporate and political power it was building toward. In 2024, desperately playing catch-up to OpenAI and Meta, Musk struck a deal with the chamber of commerce to construct what he has marketed as the “world’s largest and most powerful supercomputer,” in furtherance of xAI’s mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.” It was up and running in 122 days—a remarkable feat that he pulled off by signing a ton of NDAs and treating the Clean Air Act like a CVS receipt. Although Musk built his fortune by collecting federal subsidies for green energy, xAI initially powered the site with dozens of old gas turbines, which it claimed—when pressed, months later—were exempt from permit requirements because they were temporary.

The Clean Air Act’s exemptions were meant for things like lawn mowers, said Patrick Anderson, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, which threatened to sue xAI last year. Musk’s turbines were “emitting the amount of pollution you might see from a power plant 10 times larger,” Anderson said.

The EPA appeared to accept the law center’s argument in a regulatory decision in January. Two months later, Mississippi regulators approved 41 gas turbines at an xAI plant across the state line. The xAI experiment was clarifying in its brazenness. Musk hardly pitched his new neighbors at all. The deal was hammered out before residents of nearby Boxtown, a largely Black neighborhood in a city with one of the highest asthma rates in the country, were aware it was happening.

To Justin Pearson, the area’s Democratic state representative, Musk’s project embodies the ­historic relationship between large corporations and neighborhoods like Boxtown. His community has “been treated like an extractive colony”—a place where physical and economic health are “sacrificed” for tax revenue and oligarchic profits. A visit to the Colossi would dispel any cheery-eyed mythmaking about what you are getting when a hyperscaler moves in next door. It sounds like a jet engine from 100 yards away.

“The pride and joy of Grok is that it can create a racist Mickey Mouse,” Pearson said. “It hurts my stomach every time that I see Grok in the news, because I know that’s being powered by the pollution that we’re experiencing in our community.” (xAI did not respond to a request for comment. An ­analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee for Time found that nitrogen dioxide levels had spiked in the vicinity since the project was launched.)

The racist posts were one facet of the problem. All the sexual abuse material was another. According to the New York Times, 41 percent of all images generated by the Colossus-trained Grok over a nine-day period starting in late December were sexualized images of women, while an analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that Grok had produced 23,000 “sexualized images of children.” (X recently stated that it had a “zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”)

In February, a few weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would begin giving Grok access to classified networks, the French government’s cybercrimes ­prosecutions unit raided Musk’s Paris office over the alleged enabling of sexual abuse materials and unlawful data extraction.

But if xAI and Musk represent an edge case, it is nonetheless a revealing one. The Colossus of Memphis sends a signal about what the oligarchy is that all the whirring servers of the world can’t drown out—shimmering hot air, a reckless consolidation of power, a new extractive machine built on the foundations of old ones.

On my way out of town, just before I reached the state line, I passed a pair of lost-looking ­National Guard members walking along an empty stretch of road. This, too, was a story about the commingling of money and power in Trump’s second term. The president had deployed the Guard to Memphis following a conversation with a representative of one of the companies underwriting the new White House ballroom. The meeting was with the CEO of Union Pacific, and the project he hoped to bend Trump’s ear over that day was a new transcontinental railroad.

A large data center stands directly behind a baseball field. Three players in uniform stand in the outfield.
A data center under construction next to Sully Highlands Park, a large community area that includes a baseball field and soccer fields, in Herndon, Virginia.Stephen Voss

Zuckerberg’s project in Louisiana makes Colossus look puny. The Hyperion campus covers about three times the area of Musk’s Memphis operations. Once cotton land, the spread had been sold to the state decades ago, with an eye toward landing a major corporate client, but efforts to lure a car manufacturer had fallen through. According to the Baton Rouge Advocate, state officials first caught wind of Meta’s interest at a Mardi Gras party hosted by Shell. A few months and countless NDAs later, Louisiana had closed a deal, offering billions in incentives in the hopes of landing 300 to 500 full-time jobs. Gov. Jeff Landry hailed it as “a once-in-a-lifetime transformational opportunity.”

The frenzy of activity in Richland ­Parish was all-encompassing. At a food truck park filled with out-of-state plates, I met a duo slinging pizzas who’d worked in the North Dakota oil fields and a pit master from Mississippi who’d come from a liquefied natural gas project near the Gulf. A few months ago, the gravel lot had been someone’s home; the owner of the house next door had recently turned down an offer for $1.5 million. I took to counting the number of dump trucks I passed and learned that everyone else had been doing that, too. Diane Cobb once counted 94 on the 8-mile drive between the parish seat of Rayville and her house down the street from Hyperion. Her friend Robin Williams counted 96.

I met Cobb and Williams at a community meeting hosted by the Sierra Club’s Delta Chapter. The impetus for the meeting, held at a pizza shop, was an upcoming permitting hearing. Meta is adding more solar capacity to the Louisiana grid as part of the project, and in a statement, emphasized that it “matches 100% of our electricity usage with clean and renewable energy.” But although Meta pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 and procure “renewable energy and developing technology to support a climate resilient global community”—and although Hyperion was literally a sun god—the Louisiana supercluster will draw much of its power from natural gas. The two plants being built across the street from Cobb and Williams’ church would be capable of producing 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Not all the attendees were as critical. Curtis Harrison, a small-time real estate investor in his 60s in a Las Vegas Raiders hat, sat attentively during the town hall, notebook in hand. He told me he respected the Sierra Club’s advocacy and wanted to hear them out. But Harrison also considered the project a lifeline that the area could not afford to turn down. He had spent much of his career doing film work in California until he lost his job and much of his savings in the Great Recession. He’d moved back to his family’s home base and begun painstakingly rebuilding a nest egg.

Hyperion, he believed, was only the beginning—more companies were sure to come, and they would turn the parish into a place people moved to, rather than away from. His days were a frenzy of networking and dealing. He owned eight units and had just met with his banker to discuss buying a duplex. He was trying, he said, to bring in the future without turning his back on the old-timers. For Meta workers, he might charge $800 per month for a room. For Section 8 tenants and senior citizens, he’d charge half that. Still, he admitted, there was a note of Dr. Frankenstein to the boom.

“Be careful what you wish for, because when it comes true, then what?” he said. “We’re at the ‘then what’ part right now.”

The data centers may usher us onto a higher plane of existence and cure cancer,

but what they won’t do is reset the fundamental dynamic

between the people who live in their shadows and oligarchs who reap their rewards.

A data center in Ashburn, Virginia.Stephen Voss

Not every landlord is as reflective about the growing pains. Before I left town, I checked in with Karen Taylor, who was holding down the fort at one of the new drop-off laundry and home cleaning services in a wood-frame garage near the interstate. About a half-dozen washers and dryers shared space in the interior next to a gleaming new boat, which Taylor said belonged to the owner. She recalled being called in to clean a $125,000 home that had just flipped for $300,000. The new owners, hoping to attract Meta workers, had kicked out the old tenants and raised the rent. Taylor showed up to find kids’ toys, books, and photographs soaking in the rain.

“You know how long it took me to spend that money? One day,” Taylor said of the job. “And these people’s memories and lives, these kids—where are they? Where did they go?”

There were suspicions about Zuckerberg and Meta, and about AI more broadly. But the takeover had also crystallized people’s thoughts about power structures closer to home. The NDAs had sown distrust, and the gold rush feel made people suspicious of their neighbors. They whispered conspiratorially about well-connected residents who had bought or sold property near the site.

“It’s not Holly Ridge anymore, but Meta Ridge,” one resident complained.

It was hard to ignore that all this talk of a beautiful new future was unfolding in a place where basic services were unreliable. Only two-thirds of parish residents have access to the internet, well below the national average. Although Meta had chosen the site, in part, because there was ample water for a cooling system that can go through hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, the stuff that came out of the tap could be brown and milky and ruin your clothes in the wash. A resident who lives across the street from the site pulled out his phone to read the “boil advisory” ­notices he’d received from the parish—six in ­October alone, some lasting for days.

Louisiana is supposed to be one of the winners of the data center boom, and for some of the people who live there, it already is. There are thousands of temporary jobs for people willing to travel, and a sense of possibility, as Harrison put it, where there was once stagnation. Construction comes with ancillary benefits in addition to a whole lot of dust: Meta, in a statement, boasted that the company would fund $300 million worth of infrastructure improvements in Louisiana (including upgrades to roads and water systems) and provide $800 million in property taxes alone. The company was “dedicated to building lasting relationships and creating opportunities that strengthen the fabric of north Louisiana.” But lotteries are an extension of inequality, not an answer to it. Every time I passed by the elementary school, its playground all but enveloped by big trucks and construction equipment, it was hard not to think back to Memphis’ Pearson and his talk of “sacrifice” zones. The data centers may usher us onto a higher plane of existence and cure cancer, but what they won’t do is reset the fundamental dynamic between the people who live in their shadows and oligarchs who reap their rewards.

A headstone bearing the name "Ewing" stands just in front of a chain-link fence and the bare, tangled branches of trees. An industrial building is visible in the background.
A data center overlooks Tippett’s Hill Cemetery, one of the largest and oldest African American cemeteries in Loudoun County, Virgina, with gravestones dating back to the 1700s.Stephen Voss

For all their talk of science fiction and the great unknown that lies ahead, these empire builders are following a familiar script. “There [was] a sorcerer’s apprentice quality” to the aspiring tycoons of the 19th century, Stanford historian Richard White wrote in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. “They laid their hands on a technology they did not fully understand, initiated sweeping changes, and saw these changes often take on purposes they did not intend.”

When I spoke with White last fall, he suggested the transcontinental age ­offered a cautionary tale for today’s moguls. The Golden Spike was an exception; transcontinentals were more often a story of hubris and a driver of societal unrest. People weren’t opposed to new technology; they objected to the way it was being advanced. They rebelled against the monopolization of “private power”—the sense of subservience and dependency that railroad barons imposed on everyone else and the immense influence they wielded over democratic institutions and their lives.

“What people forget is most of those railroads went bankrupt,” White said. “They also forget that when going bankrupt, they crash the whole economy—again, not once, but at least three times in the railroad depressions in the late 19th century. They tend to be speculative enterprises, which are building not for an existing market, but for a market they think they’re going to create by the very fact that they are building it. It becomes ‘Build it and they will come.’ And they’re building into a lot of areas where they never come.”

It’s not hysterical to wonder if we’re doing the same. Altman still says the Abilene branch of his ChatGPT “Death Star”—all lit up like a secret base when I first saw it—will be fully operational by the end of the year, but he recently abandoned his plans for an expansion. Bezos has already begun to talk of big-box data centers as yesterday’s news; in two decades, he predicted recently, it would be cheaper to build them in space than in Indiana. Meta, in a move the Wall Street Journal described as “Frankenstein financing,” transferred most of the ownership of its Richland Parish operation in October to a third party—raising concerns that it could more easily exit the deal down the road. The company says the deal allowed for “strategic optionality and flexibility” to “effectively meet future infrastructure capacity needs,” and that it is committed to the $27 billion project. But fears of a false start abound. Everyone wants to be the Prometheus who stole fire. But sometimes, you’re the Prometheus whose liver got pecked out by an eagle.

The backlash to big, beautiful buildings has grown so intense that even Trump shifted his public stance, promising during the State of the Union that tech companies would henceforth supply their own power needs. (The pledge, characteristically, is nonbinding.) In the meantime, a new kind of hyperscale project was popping up in Americans’ backyards: a $38 billion plan to convert empty warehouses (including one former Amazon facility) into an archipelago of immigrant detention centers. In news stories, the gray, boxy buildings that house children and those that provide agentic workflow solutions seem to blur together. The responses from local communities were starting to sound the same, too.

It was amid the rising skepticism of oligarchs and their machines that Altman published “The Gentle Singularity” last year. The industry had sold its growth with a promise of mass disruption. The elimination of whole industries was part of the pitch. The OpenAI CEO’s manifesto reads like an attempt to recalibrate a hype cycle that had, thanks to evangelists like Altman, gotten a little out of hand. This idea that people would be losing control of their lives to robots, or to a class of people who talked like them, was unfounded. There might be some growing pains, but “with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything.”

But even as the president took steps to separate his administration from the tech titans’ unpopular ventures, the political project and the technological one could not be so easily disentangled. A few days after Trump’s big address, he and Hegseth set out to demonstrate their dominance over Amodei and Anthropic, demanding that the “RADICAL LEFT WOKE COMPANY” give the Pentagon unfettered use of its technology. When Amodei refused, citing insufficient guardrails against fully autonomous weapons systems and data collection on American citizens, the administration labeled his company a “supply chain risk” and banned any defense contractors from working with the firm. But the so-called Department of War had already lined up a replacement vendor, eager for the cash flow and ready to change the world.

The “DoW displayed a deep respect for safety,” wrote the author of “The Gentle Singularity” on the night of February 27—three hours before the start of a military campaign that killed 175 people at a school for girls, assassinated the supreme leader of Iran, triggered missile attacks in 13 countries, destroyed oil refineries, shuttered the Strait of Hormuz, and threw the global economy into crisis—and shared “a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.”

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