First in Line

Data centers had a rough week as a campaign issue — not with one party, with both. Today’s Times piece has Democrats and a growing number of Republicans running against them, the kind of alignment that usually only shows up around things nobody actually likes: potholes, robocalls, the DMV. For a while the data center was an abstraction, a beige building humming somewhere off the highway, funding the AI boom from a comfortable distance. Now it’s a line item — lopsided tax deals, dropping water tables, transformers running loud all night — and abstractions campaign badly once they move in next door.

Which is what made the Arizona water story land harder. Decades ago the state signed onto a Colorado River deal that put it first in line for cuts, in exchange for funding a massive aqueduct — a bet that “first in line” was a distant, theoretical clause. It isn’t distant anymore. The Trump administration says the time has come, and Phoenix, thirty years into marketing itself as the boomtown drought can’t touch, is reading the fine print it signed when this was somebody else’s problem.

Neither story has a villain. Both are paperwork written for an imagined future, now getting served to whoever’s actually standing there when it arrives — the data centers meant for a boom still theoretical to most voters, the water allocation signed when “first” felt like a rounding error. A lot of American governance runs this way: a signature now, a bill later, addressed to whoever’s still around to open it.

Everyone’s also calling this cycle “2006 again” — unpopular war, high prices, restless voters. Fair, except 2006 never had a trillion dollars of AI infrastructure trying to get local officials voted out.