I caught a good conversation on Morning Wire last week that I think is worth passing along, especially for folks in central Montana who’ve been hearing a lot of noise — mostly bad — about data centers. The guest was Mark Mills, founder of the National Center for Energy Analytics and author of a book called The Cloud Revolution. He’s spent a lot of time studying what these facilities actually do to a community, and his answers were a lot more measured than what you’ll find in most headlines.

First, a little context. Data centers aren’t new. The country already had around 5,000 of them before artificial intelligence started driving the current wave of construction. Every time you check your bank account, pull up a map on your phone, or stream a movie on a winter night, that’s a data center doing the work. What’s changed is the scale. AI requires far more computing power than previous applications, and the result is that we’re now building more of these facilities, and each one is considerably larger. Mills put it this way: we’ve gone from building shopping malls to building skyscrapers. The footprint is similar, but the energy demand is a different animal entirely — roughly ten times what a skyscraper of the same size would consume.

That energy question is the one most communities want answered right off the bat, and rightly so. Nobody wants to see their power bill climb because a tech giant moved in down the road. Mills addressed that directly. Most of the new data centers haven’t been built yet, so they’re not currently drawing from the grid. Where they do connect to local power systems, there’s active negotiation with grid operators to make sure consumer rates don’t take a hit. Some facilities are being designed to generate their own power entirely, staying off the shared grid altogether. And where they do tap in, the position coming from the industry — and Mills seemed to think it was being taken seriously — is that the data center pays for what it uses, period. That’s the right principle, and it’s one we should hold them to.

Water is another question that comes up. These facilities use water for cooling, but Mills pointed out that the water cycle can be closed — used and recirculated rather than consumed and discharged. They pull permits like any other industrial user, and the permitted use is based on available supply. That won’t settle every concern in a drought-prone state like ours, and it shouldn’t — those are legitimate questions to press on at the local level. But it’s not the unregulated free-for-all the alarm pieces make it sound like.

On the financial side, the data is pretty clear. These projects are a substantial boost to local tax bases. The construction phase brings significant employment, though Mills was honest that some of that workforce gets imported because the specialized trades don’t always exist locally. Long-term operational jobs are fewer but real. The bigger ongoing payoff tends to be property and tax revenue, which is exactly what a rural county with a shrinking population and a tight budget needs to hear. The aesthetic concern — a giant warehouse sitting on the landscape — is real too, and Mills didn’t dodge it. Siting matters, and communities have every right to make that part of the conversation.

One more thing Mills said that stuck with me. He made the case that AI and data infrastructure represent a genuine national security interest. Our economy runs on it, our military capability increasingly depends on it, and our adversaries — China, Russia, Iran — have every incentive to slow it down. He believes some of the loudest opposition to data centers is being fueled, at least in part, by foreign propaganda. That’s a serious charge, and I’m not saying every critic of these projects is a foreign agent — they obviously aren’t. But it’s worth keeping in mind that not all of the fear is organic, and not all of it is serving American interests. Central Montanans are skeptical by nature, and that’s healthy. But skeptical is different from reflexively opposed. These are decisions worth making with clear eyes.