Residents near Cheyenne, Wyoming, circulated petitions this spring demanding a moratorium on data center construction after a city councilman disclosed that as many as 70 projects were in various stages of development in Laramie County alone.
Citizens raised concerns about soaring electricity demand, water depletion, land annexation, housing pressure, and diesel backup generators — the transformation of ranch land and open sky into an industrial AI corridor, pressed on a community before it had a chance to ask what it was agreeing to.
Wyoming is not an outlier. Communities from Virginia to Missouri to Michigan are fighting the same pattern: Big Tech identifies strategic land, lobbyists arrive with promises of tax revenue and jobs, rezoning pressure follows, and by the time residents grasp what is coming, the decision has effectively been made for them.
The political machinery running alongside this physical buildout is equally aggressive. According to a Fortune analysis of first-quarter lobbying disclosures, eleven major technology companies — including Alphabet, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI — spent $20 million on federal lobbying in the first three months of 2026 alone, an average of $226,000 a day.
Big Tech's aggressive plan
Big Tech's lobbying expenditures have nearly doubled since 2020, while those same companies are funneling an additional $190 million into super PAC operations ahead of the midterms — a figure that measures not persuasion in a free marketplace of ideas, but financial dominance applied directly to the legislative process.
The comparison to America's original Robber Barons is not rhetorical — and Bill O'Reilly and Josh Hammer make that case with historical force in their new book Confronting Evil. John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan consolidated industrial power through railroads, oil, steel, and banking, bending government and commerce to their interests.
Today's Big Tech barons have replicated that architecture in the digital domain — controlling information systems, cloud infrastructure, search engines, digital advertising, social media platforms, and the algorithms shaping public discourse itself. Where the original monopolists cornered markets for physical goods, their successors are cornering the systems through which Americans think, communicate, and form political opinions.
The Apostle James had words for men who accumulate wealth by crushing the people beneath them: "Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you" (James 5:1). The question worth pressing in 2026 is whether the men spending $226,000 a day on federal lobbying while Wyoming ranchers absorb the noise, dust, and grid strain of their infrastructure have earned a different verdict.
In AI for Mankind's Future, I warned that unchecked AI development could make humanity "servants to machines that reflect the misguided — and, at times, even malicious — intentions of their creators." That warning has since grown physical infrastructure.
The International Energy Agency projects that global data center electricity consumption will double to 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, with U.S. facilities on track to consume more power for data processing than all energy-intensive manufacturing combined — steel, aluminum, cement, and chemicals included. Much of that electricity will be drawn from communities that had no meaningful say in the matter.
The economic case offered to those communities rarely survives contact with the fine print. Large data centers generate construction activity but relatively few permanent jobs once operational, while host communities absorb ongoing costs in grid strain, water consumption, and infrastructure maintenance.
Technology firms book the revenue and deploy algorithmic systems that increasingly shape what working families read, how their children are educated, and whether their livelihoods survive the next round of AI-driven automation. The same families absorbing the infrastructure burden are also absorbing the disruption the infrastructure enables.
The economic harm is real, but the deeper stakes run further. Scripture establishes in Genesis 1:26-27 that men and women are made in the image of God — bearers of moral agency, spiritual purpose, and inherent dignity that derives from the Creator, not from computational performance. Much of the AI industry operates on a different anthropology, measuring human worth by throughput and generating, in some influential circles, transhumanist ambitions to merge humanity with machines or replace human judgment wholesale.
As I examine in The New AI Cold War, society risks surrendering its decision-making to AI-powered systems through the gradual transfer of authority from parents, teachers, pastors, and citizens to systems designed by people who share none of their values — driven by lobbying infrastructure built precisely to outrun democratic accountability.
The policy response
The administration and Congress have clear obligations. Antitrust enforcement must be strengthened to break the concentration of AI infrastructure and cloud computing already approaching monopoly in critical sectors.
Federal law must require public disclosure of the energy and water consumption of major AI facilities before local governments are asked to approve them — communities bearing infrastructure costs deserve to know what they are agreeing to before the concrete is poured. Local zoning authority must be shielded from federal and corporate pressure to override community decisions on data center siting: what happened in Cheyenne, where residents discovered a data center was already planned for land their city council was annexing, should not be possible anywhere in this country.
Congress must also prohibit AI-driven social-credit systems and close the statutory gap that currently leaves algorithmic surveillance architectures — systems capable of rivaling China's — largely in private hands with no federal prohibition. The window to establish these guardrails before the infrastructure becomes too embedded to challenge is open now, but it will not stay open indefinitely.
What is actually at stake
America's original Robber Barons eventually faced the Sherman Antitrust Act and the reforms that reined in their power, not because the political class acted on principle alone, but because enough citizens demanded accountability loudly enough to matter.
Today's Big Tech barons are pursuing something considerably more ambitious: influence over information flows, behavioral patterns, governance structures, and ultimately over what human beings believe, choose, and value. The communities pushing back in Cheyenne are insisting that the people who live somewhere should retain authority over what happens there — a principle scripture affirms and that American constitutional tradition was designed to protect. The rest of the country needs to make the same demand while there is still room to act.
Notice: This column is printed with permission. Opinion pieces published by AFN.net are the sole responsibility of the article's author(s), or of the person(s) or organization(s) quoted therein, and do not necessarily represent those of the staff or management of, or advertisers who support the American Family News Network, AFN.net, our parent organization or its other affiliates.
