There is something familiar about being told that America must build faster, spend more, and stop arguing because an overseas rival is about to overtake us.

It brings me back to the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s. Fallout shelters. School drills. The missile gap. The fear that we were falling behind and that catching up was a matter of national survival. Children practiced ducking under desks, while adults debated how much more the country needed to spend on defense.

Reading AWS CEO Matt Garman’s defense of the data center buildout, I felt some of that old alarm coming back. This time, the argument is about AI infrastructure. The warning is that slowing construction could leave America behind for generations.

I take competition with China seriously. I also believe AI will require substantial investment. But using China as the bogeyman cannot be the answer to every question about how much we should build, where we should build it and who should pay.

If the national-security argument is sound, it should survive those questions.

National Security Comes to the Zoning Hearing

In his Oct. 2, 2026 post, Garman makes the case that data centers are essential to America’s economic and security future. He warns about construction moratoriums and alleges foreign efforts to spread misinformation. He does not name China in that passage.

It is a powerful argument to bring into a local approval process. A community evaluating a development proposal suddenly finds itself weighing the country’s place in the world.

My concern is the pressure that framing creates. Asking about a substation or water supply can start to sound like obstructing a national mission. The developer’s preferred timetable becomes the country’s timetable, and delay becomes defeat.

Amazon has every right to advocate for its projects. It also has a financial interest in selling the computing those projects will provide. There is nothing improper about that. The problem comes when we are asked to accept that commercial expansion and national necessity are the same thing.

They can overlap. How much they overlap needs to be demonstrated.

Amazon also announced more than $1 billion in additional community investment over five years, changes to government nondisclosure agreements, annual energy and water reporting, and commitments intended to cover the energy and infrastructure costs its facilities create. Those deserve credit and follow-through.

But the existence of a community program does not answer whether a particular project is the right project.

Before We Declare a Gap

The missile-gap history offers a useful warning about how loosely we can define falling behind.

A 1963 defense memorandum preserved by the State Department describes the controversy as a muddle of measurements. Conclusions depended on which weapons were included, whether raw numbers represented a meaningful strategic disadvantage, and whether the concern involved existing capabilities or feared future ones. Its accompanying notes describe substantial downward revisions in estimates of Soviet ICBM deployment during 1961.

The Soviet Union was a real adversary. Nuclear danger was real. Neither fact made every estimate correct.

We ought to apply the same discipline to AI. What gap are we trying to close?

A gap in frontier-model performance is different from a shortage of computing capacity. Access to advanced chips is different from the ability to put AI to work in factories, hospitals or government agencies. Military usefulness requires its own assessment. None of those can be established simply by counting buildings.

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index illustrates the difficulty. It describes a near-closed US-China model-performance gap while reporting 5,427 data centers in the United States, more than ten times the number in any other country.

That does not prove America has enough compute. A facility count tells us little about the equipment inside, the workloads served or the capacity available. And the report’s benchmark findings are a dated snapshot, not a complete assessment of national power.

What it does tell us is that “winning the AI race” needs a definition.

I want America to develop and deploy useful AI. I want the economic benefits and the ability to defend ourselves. I am less impressed by a contest to announce the largest campus or reserve the most electricity.

Those investments need to deliver something beyond a bigger number in a press release.

A Foreign Campaign Does Not Explain Your Neighbor

There is evidence behind the concern about foreign influence, and we should acknowledge it.

In June, OpenAI reported a likely China-origin operation that generated comments and images criticizing data center development. The company described deceptive participation in an existing American debate. It also reported that it found no evidence of meaningful reach beyond the operation’s own activity.

That qualification belongs in the discussion.

An attempt to manipulate public opinion is serious. It does not establish that opposition at a county meeting was manufactured overseas. Nor does it tell us whether a particular concern about electricity prices is accurate.

Foreign operators can exploit real disputes. They can repeat information that is true while lying about who they are. The deception deserves scrutiny, and the underlying claims still require examination.

We should investigate interference without turning residents into suspects because their objections resemble something a foreign account posted.

Otherwise, we give an overseas operation remarkable power: All it has to do is repeat a legitimate concern, and we start dismissing the Americans who raised it.

Who Pays When the Forecast Changes?

There is no question that the potential electricity demand is substantial.

Berkeley Lab’s June 2026 update projects that US data centers could account for 11.8% of national electricity consumption in 2030. Its uncertainty range runs from 9.5% to 15.3%. These figures cover all data centers, and they are forecasts rather than estimates of a national-security requirement.

A range that wide should make us careful about commitments built around one assumed future.

Utilities and communities need to know what happens if a project draws less power than expected, fills more slowly or changes direction. If infrastructure was built for demand that never arrives, who remains responsible for the cost?

Private financing of the facility does not, by itself, answer that question. The utility arrangements have to answer it. Any public incentives have to be evaluated separately, project by project.

The International Energy Agency’s analysis is more conditional than the slogans on either side. Additional demand can improve the use of existing infrastructure under some conditions. In tighter systems, it can require investments that put upward pressure on prices. Uncertain data center loads and the mismatch between development schedules and grid investment create risks that policy must address.

That is a reason to examine contracts, not assume every data center will raise bills or every new investment will lower them.

In a Sep 29, 2026 concurrence, FERC Commissioner David Rosner called for large-load tariffs, collateral requirements and clear curtailment rules protecting essential customers. His statement supports the need for concrete safeguards; it does not mean they are already in place everywhere.

A homeowner should not have to understand electricity-market regulation to find out whether the household is backing someone else’s growth forecast.

The people negotiating these projects should make that answer clear before the commitments are made.

Put the Promises in the Agreement

Amazon’s announced commitments provide a place to start.

If the company intends to cover the costs its projects create, communities should be able to see how the agreements accomplish that. The obligations should hold if demand disappoints or plans change.

Minimum payments and collateral can give a promise financial backing. Public terms can let residents judge what their officials have accepted. Independent reporting can show whether the results match the projections.

Water needs the same local treatment. A community needs information about its own supply and the proposed facility’s demands. A national average, however reassuring, cannot settle whether a particular location can support a particular project.

Jobs should also be explained plainly. Construction employment is valuable. Permanent operating employment is valuable. Communities deserve to know the expected numbers and duration of each, along with the qualifications and hiring plans.

The question is whether these protections are strong enough to last beyond the announcement.

I would welcome a developer making a convincing public case, paying for the costs it creates and accepting responsibility if its forecasts fall short. That is how you earn support from people who will live alongside the project.

Telling them the country cannot afford their hesitation is a poor substitute.

What Does Winning Look Like?

I do not want America to stop building. I want us to build with a better account of what we are buying.

A serious AI strategy should explain where additional compute is needed and what it will accomplish. It should also address talent, deployment, efficiency and supply-chain resilience. A country can have impressive infrastructure and still struggle to turn it into useful capability.

Competition with China strengthens the case for doing that work well. It does not relieve us of the need to do it.

There will be projects worth accelerating. There may be projects whose costs, locations or assumptions need to change. We should be capable of making those judgments without treating every approval as a victory and every objection as a strategic defeat.

The Cold War left us with experience worth remembering. A genuine rival can create urgency while the size and nature of a claimed gap remain uncertain. We need to measure before we commit, and keep measuring after we do.

Amazon can make its case. So can the rest of the industry. They should bring evidence about demand, public agreements about costs and protections that communities can enforce.

If a data center is essential to America’s future, explain what makes it essential.

Then explain who gets the bill.