For decades, rural Americans were told the industries that built their towns had no place in the future. They were ordered to “learn to code” as their American dream was regulated out of existence.
One by one, the industries and ways of life that built rural communities were regulated, litigated, and culturally condemned out of existence. Their mills were too polluting, their mines too destructive, their coal plants too dirty. Logging destroyed the forests. Oil and gas threatened the climate.
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Now, many of the same elites and politicians who spent decades attacking those industries are telling rural America to embrace AI data centers with open arms.
To be clear, I believe we should. The United States needs to win the artificial intelligence race, and much of the land, energy, and infrastructure required sit in rural U.S. These data centers will generate substantial property tax revenue, create construction jobs, and expand local grid capacity, bolstering struggling towns. They may also prove to be one of the most important infrastructure investments of the next generation.
The U.S.’s previous industrial revolutions were built by rural communities. Rural people produced the steel that raised our skyscrapers, harvested the timber that built our towns, mined the minerals that powered our electric grid, and supplied the energy that fueled American prosperity. This time, rural America has the chance to power what may be the most profound technological leap in human history, an innovation with the possibility to transform medicine, energy, science, and human capability at a speed and scale never seen before.
But rural Americans are noticing something important: the same political and bureaucratic institutions that spent decades dismantling their traditional industries are now aggressively promoting a new politically favored one.
For generations, rural America built real prosperity by building the country with jobs that created durable middle-class lives and entire local economies. Then Washington decided many of them were no longer acceptable. Farmers were told what they could grow. Energy projects vanished into years of permitting delays. Blue-collar workers in rural states were told the tourism economy was their future, and it was brighter than ever before.
The major problem with this fantasy is that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average weekly earnings in mining and logging are roughly $1,900. By comparison, workers in leisure and hospitality earn only about $600. Replacing a mining job with a tourism job isn’t economic development. It’s a poverty-inducing pay cut.
As traditional, productive industries were regulated out of existence, the family-supporting jobs that anchored these communities disappeared. The next generation left in droves, hollowing out entire towns. Between 2010 and 2020, two-thirds of rural counties lost population, the first decadelong rural population decline in U.S. history. Since 1980, the economic chasm between urban and rural America has widened dramatically. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average household income in rural areas now sits at just $63,750, lagging more than $23,000 a year behind urban households. Replacing a productive industrial base with a service economy has left entire communities fundamentally behind.
After decades of this treatment, rural communities are now being told they should enthusiastically support AI server campuses where mills, mines, factories, and power plants once stood.
The issue is not whether data centers should exist. It is whether ordinary people still have the freedom to decide what kind of economy they want for their communities. The American dream should not depend on whether Washington considers an industry fashionable.
People are tired of top-down economic planning by distant bureaucracies and political elites that pick favored industries while regulating others into decline.
Rural Americans are right to be skeptical of top-down mandates from the very institutions that hollowed out their economies. But the solution isn’t rejecting AI. It’s demanding consistency.
WASHINGTON CANNOT KEEP UNDERMINING THE DOCTORS AMERICANS DEPEND ON
Washington and Big Tech might find that rural Americans would not resist data centers at all if they were free to mine the minerals that make their microchips possible, unleash the U.S. energy that powers them, and harvest the timber used to build them — all while earning a living and building an American dream of their own through a hard day’s work with dignity and pride.
Rural Americans do not fear the future. They fear losing the freedom to build it themselves. The question is not whether the U.S. should build data centers; we need to. The question is whether Americans are still free to build everything else.
Jesse Ramos is the state director for Americans for Prosperity-Montana and a former Missoula, Montana, city councilman.
