Source: Ars Technica
As AI infrastructure scales, electricity consumption from data centers is pricing out traditional manufacturers in the Rust Belt who depend on cheap power to compete globally—surfacing a direct conflict between Trump's reshoring agenda and the capital intensity of modern compute. The constraint is physical: grid capacity and power costs are finite resources, and data centers willing to pay premium rates for power are outbidding factories that operate on thin margins, making the economic case for bringing manufacturing back home harder than policymakers assumed.