On paper, nothing connects them. A ranching town of 140 on the Montana prairie; a poor province in China’s mountainous southwest. Different countries, different languages, opposite ends of the political spectrum. And yet a piece of news out of Montana last week gave me a chill of recognition, because I have watched this happen before.
Between 2019 and last year, across return visit after return visit to Guizhou, I watched the data centers rise on farmland — sited on some of China’s most vulnerable rural ground, drinking its water and its power, serving users a thousand miles east. China even has a name for the arrangement: 东数西算, Eastern Data, Western Computing. The computing goes where the land and electricity are cheap; the data, and the benefit, flow back to the wealthy coast. The policy is honest about who it’s for.
So when I read Juliet Macur’s account of Kassi Solberg — a stay-at-home mother of six in Broadview, Montana, fighting a 5,000-acre AI data center the size of 3,800 football fields — the story felt less like news than like a rhyme.
Consider the structure, not the setting. The campus would sit on Broadview’s farmland. It would drink the town’s water, in a place where residents already can’t shower and run laundry at the same time. And it would draw power on a scale that beggars belief: the developer first sought enough electricity to light every home in Montana on an average day, then announced it would need more than 7,000 megawatts — more than the Grand Coulee Dam, the largest power plant in the country. What stays in Broadview is thin. The permanent jobs, by the developer’s own count: “30, 40, 100 — he doesn’t know for sure.” Janitors, maintenance, security. Like “being a miner,” the company’s man said, “but not having to grab a drill.”
That phrase stopped me, because I have spent years among people who actually grab the drill.
Guizhou has been here before, twice. First it was coal. For decades the province sold its coal to the coastal factories under a pricing system rigged against it — what Chinese economists call the “scissors gap.” Inland provinces sold raw materials cheap and bought finished goods dear. In 1989, Guizhou’s region produced coal at around 131 yuan a ton and sold it at roughly 65. The arithmetic was not an accident; it was the policy. A poor province subsidized a rich one, ton by ton, and ran a poverty trap doing it. (I tell that story at length in Small Works.) Then it was electricity: under 西电东送, West-to-East Power Transmission, Guizhou’s dammed rivers and coal plants lit the homes and ran the air conditioners of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, a thousand miles away. Now it is data. Same province, same logic, third technology. The drill changes. The direction of the benefit does not.
Here is the part I want to be honest about, because it complicates the easy outrage. In Guizhou, extraction was not pure villainy. The small coal mines — ad hoc teams of farmers with pickaxes, mining in the off-season — put real cash in poor hands. I sat in a guesthouse in Bakai and listened to a farmer describe organizing his neighbors to mine a pit and sell to a local brickmaker. Dangerous work; sometimes fatal work. But it was income where there had been none. Coal reduced poverty in Guizhou even as the scissors gap impeded the province’s growth. Both things were true at once. That is what extraction usually looks like up close — not theft, but a bad bargain offered to people with few others. Broadview’s “30, 40, 100” janitor jobs are that bargain in English. The question is never “jobs or no jobs.” It is whether survival wages are fair exchange for handing over your water, your power, and your say.
Which brings me to the difference that should matter, and apparently doesn’t.
Guizhou’s farmers had no vote to cast against Beijing’s grid planners. Broadview does. Montana has town councils, county commissioners, public hearings — the whole apparatus of self-rule that the Guizhou comparison is supposed to throw into relief. So: does it help?
Read the record and weep a little. Democracy did not bring transparency: the only words left unredacted on the power company’s letter of intent, one expert noted, were the ones marking it confidential. It did not bring responsiveness: when Solberg asked her town council to hold a public forum, the mayor refused because the site sits just outside town limits — “it doesn’t affect us.” It did not bring information: trust us, the developer says, you’ll know more once we sign the contract. And when Solberg stood before the county commissioners and read her research on what these facilities do to water, air temperature and electricity, one of them cut her off: “How much longer?”
That is the sentence that should haunt anyone who thinks democracy is self-executing. Not opposition. Not even denial. Impatience. The thing they could see from their own porches, they declared themselves powerless — and unwilling — to touch.
Strip away the flags and the languages, and the lives converge. The farmer in Guizhou and the mother in Broadview stand on the same ground: their resources extracted, their objections logged and waved off, the beneficiaries somewhere over the horizon. Kassi Solberg can shout. The New York Times can report. Those are real freedoms, and they are not nothing — a Guizhou farmer had neither. But if the bulldozers come anyway, they will be cold comfort: the liberties of a system that, asked to weigh a small community’s life against a distant appetite, looked at its watch.
The developer offered Broadview one more thing. For anyone who doesn’t like living next to a data center, he said, “there’s probably a county up the road that doesn’t have one.” Move along, in other words. The land was only ever an input.
There is a name for treating the place people live as nothing but a resource to be optimized for someone else’s purposes, deaf to the people who can see exactly what is being taken. It is the opposite of sufficiency-first — the conviction that an economy should first meet the needs of the people who live in a place, before it serves appetites somewhere else. And the disregard for that conviction does not need an authoritarian state to flourish. It only needs everyone with the power to ask one question — for whom? — to instead ask another.
How much longer?