Friedberg’s Datacenter Wake-Up Call:  If We Don't Build Them Here, Other Countries Will @friedberg explains why a datacenter moratorium would be a disaster for the US: The data coming in and out of datacenters moves at roughly the speed of light, so you could put them anywhere. And I think that our policymakers need to be very cognizant of that fact. You have, and we do, connect to the internet using high speed cable, high speed fiber optic throughout the world, and so theoretically, if we don't embrace and allow the economic development of the datacenter industry, and it will fundamentally be an industry because it is almost like the new oil, if we don't put them here, someone else will put them on their shores. Someone else will put them in their country, someone else will put them in their jurisdiction, and a lot of the economic value that arises from the people that will build those facilities, the energy that will be installed to produce power for those facilities, and then all of the second and third order industries that emerge as a result of those installations, that value will accrue elsewhere. The demand is there. The economy's moving forward, AI's moving forward. Datacenters do not take up a lot of space. They're very small relative to the economic value that they produce. If you zoom out on the map of the world, all the datacenters in the world fit under the tip of a pin, and so this is a very small footprint. If we're going to give up hundreds of thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars of economic value creation, we're being pretty silly and pretty obtuse in our view of the world. Provided datacenters are producing their own electricity, that means that you're taking electricity consumption off the grid because they otherwise are not being used on the grid, and that will reduce the cost of electricity for other residential and industrial users. So it's silly to think that we need to put a moratorium on datacenters. As soon as you do that, the companies that use datacenters are not going to slow down. They're going to go put them somewhere else, and we're going to miss out.