WHY AMERICA CAN’T BUILD AI DATA CENTERS FAST ENOUGH
The short version: O'Leary's pitch for gas-fired AI buildouts as a patriotic race skips the part where locals eat the rate hikes, water draws, and tax giveaways.
Our Take
Kevin O'Leary's pitch is simple: gas is fast, abundant, and the only way to out-build China, so states like North Dakota and West Virginia should throw open the door. It's a great sales pitch for a data center developer. It's a lot thinner as a plan for the people who live near the turbines, pipelines, and substations that come with it.
"We can't build fast enough" is doing a lot of work in that framing. Fast usually means fewer public hearings, shorter environmental review, and utility commissions waving through cost-recovery deals that get baked into everyone's monthly bill — whether or not you ever queried a chatbot. Gas peaker plants built to back up a single campus don't disappear when the AI cycle cools; the debt service and the emissions stick around, and so does the question of who actually approved the interconnection agreement and the tax abatement that made the math pencil out.
We're not arguing gas can't power a data center — obviously it can. We're asking who signed the deal, what ratepayers and aquifers got pledged in the process, and whether "industrial revolution" is doing the same rhetorical job "national security" did for the last land grab. Check our facility map to see what's already landed near you, and if a project's headed your way, our take-action page has the questions worth asking before the ribbon-cutting.
This is GridWatch the USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Kevin O'Leary, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.