Kevin O’Leary: I’ve solved your data center problem

• Americans don’t agree on much.
• But a majority of them don’t want to live near a data center. That’s a real problem for AI boosters.
• Analyst Ben Thompson has a suggestion: Cut everyone — everyone — a check.

We’re also told that all of this is inevitable, and that we don’t really have a say in it — you can’t hold back technology! — and that all we can do is hope to adapt. So pushing back against a data center project in your town seems like a pretty reasonable kind of protest vote. Maybe I can’t keep AI from upending my life, but at least I can keep it out of my backyard.

So what if you’re a well-meaning AI booster who thinks the backlash is truly misguided, and that fighting against data centers is as dumb as fighting against highways?

Analyst Ben Thompson has a suggestion: Pay off the backlash by cutting checks to people in data center towns.

If data centers are a resource for our AI future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data center up the road weren’t sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits that my local government may or may not spend appropriately, but rather were to result in a check in the mailbox every year, I suspect you could get a lot more people on board!

The sober answer to this, of course, is that AI data centers are already supposed to be paying the people in the towns they’re in. They bring jobs in the short term, and are meant to spur all kinds of economic activity in the long term.

But it’s one thing to tell someone the ominous-looking building down the street is going to make some electricians a bunch of money. It’s another to hand everyone a check. And if it’s the Kevin O’Learys and other technocrats writing the check — taking cash from their pockets and putting it in yours — maybe it makes the worrisome future of AI easier to handle, in the present tense.