The Invisible Trillion · The Bill

Nobody Knows

I’ve laid out the case as I see it, and I want to be honest about the size of what I don’t know, because it sits underneath everything above.

I don’t know whether this is a bubble. I don’t know whether the demand projections will hold. I don’t know whether the host communities will recover or hollow out, whether the affected retirees will lose five percent of their savings or fifty, whether the figures at the center of this era will read in hindsight as visionaries or cautionary tales or — most likely — as complicated people whose real contributions and real damage were inseparable. Nobody knows these things in 2026. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What is operating, right now, is a narrative — a story about why the buildout is necessary, why the costs are acceptable, why the line goes up. It has many authors whose interests happen to align: the hyperscalers, the chipmakers, the financial press, the defense establishment, the investment industry, the trade groups. It coheres not because anyone coordinates it but because everyone benefits from it cohering. And like the dotcom narrative and the housing narrative before it, it will keep doing its job long after the facts stop cooperating, because the job — mobilizing capital, justifying permissiveness, holding valuations up — is still needed.

The narrative asks to be swallowed whole, because it hangs together better as a whole than its parts do separately. The honest move is to decline, and take it claim by claim.

How many drones has Ukraine used? Probably accurate; the evidence is open. Are several hundred new data centers needed by 2030? Partly true, partly inflated, resting on demand projections the narrative itself shapes. Is the buildout essential to national security? Partly — a real subset is; most of it isn’t, and the “all of it” version is doing PR work. Are data centers good for the neighborhoods that host them? No — the evidence on that is overwhelming, and the claim survives only as narrative. Are the operators visionaries? Partly, and partly hagiography; they’ve built real things and done things that, in other industries, would be called predatory. Each claim has to be weighed on its own evidence. Some survive. Some don’t.

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