DATA CENTERS ARE THE NEW BILLIONAIRES (AND THEY WANT YOUR WATER)
The parallels are uncanny, the irony is not lost, and the cooling bills are astronomical
For years, education advocates have tracked the billionaire playbook: arrive uninvited, consume enormous resources, generate heat while producing little of public value, and insist the whole enterprise is for your benefit. We've watched Reed Hastings build charter empires. We've watched the Walton heirs fund "disruption." We've watched Eli Broad reshape school boards like a hobbyist rearranging furniture in someone else's house.
Now meet the new billionaire. It doesn't have a face. It doesn't give TED Talks. It has approximately 50,000 servers, a 20-megawatt power draw, and it just filed for a zoning variance in your school district's backyard.
Ladies and gentlemen: the data center.
The similarities are, upon reflection, embarrassing in their precision.
They Both Consume Staggering Public Resources While Insisting They're Giving Back
A hyperscale data center uses between one and five million gallons of water per day for cooling — roughly the daily consumption of a mid-sized city. Billionaires, for their part, consume the democratic equivalent: regulatory attention, legislative bandwidth, school board meeting hours, and the civic oxygen of communities trying to run public institutions on austerity budgets.
Both will, when pressed, point to their charitable contributions. The data center sponsors a 5K run. The billionaire endows a wing. Neither pipes a drop back.
They Generate Enormous Heat While Claiming to Be Cool
This is perhaps the most precise analogy available to modern science. Data centers produce so much waste heat that entire engineering disciplines exist to manage it. The servers run hot; the cooling systems run constantly; the net result is that the surrounding environment is measurably warmer than before they arrived.
Billionaires operate identically. Every "philanthropic initiative" generates controversy, community fracture, and the low-grade fever of a school board that now has to spend three meetings parsing a gift with seventeen strings attached. Reed Hastings did not cool the waters of California education policy. He raised them to a rolling boil and called it innovation.
Both, notably, prefer to locate their heat-generating operations somewhere with cheap electricity, weak unions, and a compliant local government. Rural Nevada. Arizona. The American South. Anywhere the residents are too economically precarious to say no.
They Both Operate Behind Layers of Abstraction Designed to Obscure Accountability
You cannot call a data center. You cannot attend its board meeting. Its parent company is a subsidiary of a holding company registered in Delaware, which licenses its infrastructure to a cloud division that contracts with a managed services provider that is, technically, based in Luxembourg.
The billionaire school reformer has mastered the same architecture. The "independent" nonprofit is seeded by the foundation, which shares board members with the policy shop, which placed its alumni in the district's central office, which approved the curriculum contract that flows back to the portfolio company. It's not corruption, exactly. It's just a cooling system for accountability.
They Both Promise Jobs
The data center will create 50 permanent jobs. This is always announced with fanfare and a mayor in a hard hat. It is almost always true. What is less frequently announced is that the facility, which consumed $400 million in tax incentives, generates those 50 jobs while automating away the warehouse, the call center, the processing floor — a net displacement that the ribbon-cutting ceremony declines to address.
The billionaire education reformer will create "pathways." He will fund a "pipeline." He will endow a fellowship for "next-generation leaders" in education transformation. The number of those leaders who remain in underfunded public schools five years later is left as an exercise for the auditor.
Neither Pays What They Owe
Data centers have become extraordinarily skilled at negotiating tax abatements, payment-in-lieu agreements, enterprise zone benefits, and utility rate exceptions. In Virginia — home to the largest data center market on Earth — localities have discovered that the assessed value of a data center, combined with the tax deal required to attract it, produces a net fiscal contribution roughly equivalent to a Denny's.
Billionaires have similarly mastered the donor-advised fund, the charitable LLC, the opportunity zone investment, the conservation easement, the foundation that never spends more than the legally required five percent. The California Billionaire Tax Act exists precisely because the existing system was designed, over decades of careful lobbying, to ensure they would never pay what the arithmetic suggests they owe.
The children in underfunded schools are, in both cases, downstream of the accounting.
They Both Insist They Are the Future
This is the most important parallel, and the most important to resist.
The data center arrives with inevitability as its primary argument. AI requires this. Progress requires this. The energy grid will adapt. The water table will manage. Your concerns are the concerns of someone who does not understand the future, and the future does not have time for your concerns.
The billionaire school reformer arrives the same way. Disruption is coming regardless. The factory jobs are not coming back. The traditional school model is a relic. Your union contract is a nostalgia object. Your resistance to his vision is merely proof that you are not a stakeholder in tomorrow.
Both are wrong in the same way: the future is not a force of nature. It is a set of choices made by people with power, ratified or contested by everyone else. Data centers are not inevitable. Charter networks built on billionaire money are not inevitable. Both are decisions, made by specific people, for specific reasons, with specific beneficiaries.
The question has always been the same: who decides, who benefits, and who ends up cooling the machine?
The Big Education Ape has been asking that question since before "disruption" was a compliment.
Filed under: Satire, Technology Policy, Billionaire Reform, Follow the Money
