// infrastructure aesthetics

Source: The New Yorker Daily (paywall)

Data centers—infrastructure once invisible to public discourse—are now battlegrounds in electoral politics, with candidates staking positions on everything from their visual impact to land use. This elevation reflects deeper anxieties about AI's material footprint, energy consumption, and who bears the costs of training LLMs. The debate has shifted from technical minutiae to kitchen-table concerns: property values, local resources, community character. A sitting president defending data center aesthetics signals that the infrastructure industry no longer controls infrastructure decisions alone.