For a sense of how quickly the politics of data centres has changed, consider three very different states: Illinois, Texas and Pennsylvania. In 2019 J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, signed a bipartisan law creating incentives for their construction. “In today’s world,” he declared, “data centres are as critical a part of our infrastructure as our roads, trains and schools.” In Texas, Greg Abbott boasted as recently as last year that the state was “the epicentre of AI development” while welcoming new Google data centres. Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor, was similarly enthusiastic: “We are already all in on AI.”