Ricardo Semler on the prisoner’s dilemma on data centers: trillions of dollars obsolete in just a few years

The conversation around data centers has turned into a nose-to-nose shouting match between politicians, NIMBYs, and tech billionaires.

Ask about the concerns and you’ll get an earful about water consumption, farmland, rural electricity bills and tax abatements.

Every objection is reasonable, but each assumes the buildings these data centers will occupy will still be worth something in 2035.

Once again, everyone is asking the wrong questions.

Here’s the right one: “What happens to data centers and the towns they occupy when the structures outlive the infrastructure?” Demand for data center space is ravenous.

According to Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), one of the world’s largest commercial real estate companies, only one percent of North America’s data-center space sits empty.

JLL says data center customers also contracted for a record amount of electric generating capacity—twenty-five gigawatts—in the first six months of 2026.

That’s five percent of all the electricity the U.S. generates in an entire year (or 20.66 flux capacitors).

Because traditional data-center markets are running out of generation capacity, 77% of new data centers in the pipeline are shifting toward “frontier” markets like West Texas, northeast Louisiana, and east of Columbus, Ohio.

Around $7 trillion in financing and investment is being lined up to keep the concrete and electrons flowing.

If that scenario sounds familiar, think Rust Belt.

The beating heart of industrial America had capillaries running into hundreds of towns in the Midwest, Plains, and Appalachia—row upon row of factories turning out everything from lawnmowers to living room sets, creating jobs and mini-booms of economic prosperity.

That is, until globalization and automation turned out the lights, leaving the crumbling brick hulks and rusting machinery that have become avatars of exurban poverty and rage from Youngstown, Ohio to Gary, Indiana.

But the Rust Belt was built from things everybody wanted…until the economic equations stopped balancing.