By Doug Kelly
While American lawmakers debate new limits on artificial intelligence (AI) and the data centers that power it, something very real is happening in communities across this country: The AI boom is creating local jobs.
In January alone, the U.S. added 33,000 construction jobs. More than 25,000 of those were in nonresidential specialty trades – electricians, mechanical crews, and infrastructure workers building data centers and power systems.
What’s more, a recent American Edge Project study found that America’s data center and AI boom will generate nearly $27 billion in state and local tax revenue over the next decade, funding that can help pay for additional teachers, police, firefighters, and other community priorities.
This is what the AI debate often misses. AI isn’t just software, but also a collection of local physical infrastructure –
steel in the ground, upgraded substations, extended transmission and fiber lines, new cooling systems, and a scale up of generating power – that is vital to our national strength and our local prosperity.
Now zoom out globally.
This week, China’s political and legislative leadership gathers for its annual “Two Sessions“ conference to set national economic direction – and energy and AI are being treated as part of the same strategic agenda. Last year alone, China added more than 430 gigawatts of new power generation capacity, eight times what America built. Beijing isn’t just talking about energy as strategy. It’s building it.
Chinese officials are explicitly tying this energy expansion to AI deployment, but they also recognize that abundant electricity is also an essential ingredient for all of Beijing’s other ambitions, including advanced manufacturing leadership, expanded economic growth, and overcoming America’s technological edge.
But too many U.S. policymakers still assume American AI leadership is inevitable and cannot be lost. That’s just not true. In reality, we are in a fierce neck-and-neck competition with China. If we slow electricity generation, if we block transmission expansion, if we constrain data center development, we weaken our own position. That will have a generational impact.
America absolutely has the talent, capital, and innovation capacity to lead. But leadership requires a shared mission to build and secure our advantage, just as we did in the space race, the interstate highway system, and other critical national investments. That’s why electricity and compute power (chips and data centers) must be treated as strategic assets. Every local infrastructure decision, every transmission project ruling adds to or subtracts from our national capacity and our local prosperity.
This isn’t theoretical. AI, data centers, and the energy to power them mean jobs today, economic strength tomorrow, and increased national security for the next decade.
AI is going to shape the future. The question is whether America will build what this moment requires of us to lead that future.