I get it. I really do. Data centers are noisy. They are ugly. They can push up electricity prices for customers like you and me, an important point to which I’ll return.

They are also being built by big tech companies that have squandered public trust. They promised us that social media would connect the world. Instead, it harmed our kids and denuded our attention spans.

But even with all these concerns, I believe that the decisions in the coming months on data center build-out are among the most consequential in history.

I also believe that the right policy, give or take a few caveats, is simple: build, baby, build.

To see my reasoning, come to the nation of my birth. The UK. Terrific place. Big Ben. Impressive universities like Oxford and Cambridge. The nation that incubated the Industrial Revolution. What’s not to like?

Well, about 25 years ago, the Brits took a decision. We decided to prioritize the environment over construction, nice views over vital infrastructure, tangible local concerns over the distant abstraction of the national interest.

You can probably understand the motive if you’ve ever read “The Lord of the Rings.” We wanted to be The Shire, that picturesque idyll of trees, lovely pubs, and hobbits. In many ways, The Shire was J.R.R. Tolkien’s paean to the England he adored and wished to protect.

But you know the old saying about how the road to hell is paved with good intentions? The cumulative effect of these policies has turned the UK not into The Shire but into something more like Mirkwood: cold, poor and increasingly lacking in beauty.

The logic is simple. If you fail to build infrastructure, the local environment may look terrific except for the fact that, over time, you can’t afford to look at it very much. They call it a cost of living crisis, but it’s really a building crisis. When you keep adding new environmental and other requirements to any project, you create a viper’s nest of vested interests that block, stymie and delay.

This is why obtaining permission for a project in the UK is now more difficult than building it. The planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing ran to nearly 360,000 pages and cost almost $400 million, more than twice what Norway paid to actually build the world’s longest road tunnel. All told, more than $1.6 billion was spent before a spade went into the ground.

Such stories abound in Britain. The do-gooders wanted to preserve local wildlife, a lovely sentiment. What happened in practice is that $133 million was loaded onto the cost of a tunnel to protect bats from a rail line. The do-gooders wanted to burnish their green credentials, and ended up exporting emissions to other nations whose products they bought while their own industries were hollowed out.

Was this hypocrisy or treason?

The UK is not unlike California without Silicon Valley: all the gridlock, none of the growth to pay for it. And it makes me want to cry. I see a nation of vast potential being slowly strangled by what we might call Shire syndrome. Entrepreneurs, business leaders and blue-collar workers don’t lack talent but are increasingly priced out of global markets. Old people struggle to heat their homes. Living standards have been stagnant for more than 20 years.

With this warning in mind, let us circle back to America, a nation with so much going for it.

Again, I get the concerns about data centers but it’s worth stating that a moratorium in the US would not stop AI development. It would merely export it to the Gulf, China and beyond. And this would make American infrastructure vulnerable to cyberattack, the military vulnerable to foreign dominance and US companies vulnerable to competition.

When Trump says, “Whoever wins AI, wins,” he’s not kidding.

But let us also acknowledge that AI supremacy, while a vital strategic interest, also requires a wise approach.

Without enough reliable baseload power, new data centers will strain the system. Tech firms should be required to secure direct power sources, whether gas turbines, nuclear restarts or dedicated connections, rather than leaning solely on the grid. Households shouldn’t pay for upgrades that serve AI companies.

One also notes the “circular funding” of the big AI companies, where chip companies are guaranteeing loans for the firms that buy their chips. They tell us it’s all above board but it smells fishy. What’s imperative is that if the AI boom turns to bust, shareholders should pick up the bill, not taxpayers. Americans are sick of socialism for the superrich, rugged capitalism for everyone else.

I acknowledge that this analysis will seem to some readers overly parochial. What about an AI-induced jobs apocalypse? What about existential risk? Shouldn’t humanity pause to contemplate and contain these dangers?

To be clear, I worry about these things as much as the next prepper, but in the absence of an enforceable global accord, what’s the alternative to the US trying to stay ahead?

And this takes us back to The Shire — for there’s a part of the story that hobbits never knew. The Shire was not peaceful because it was idyllic. It was peaceful because, beyond its borders, the Rangers kept watch. Rugged, unthanked and mostly unseen, they held back the dark forces so that hobbits could tend their gardens and squabble over fence lines. The Shire’s tranquility depended utterly on strength somewhere else.

In the age of AI, nobody is keeping watch on America’s behalf. You are the City upon a Hill, the soldier on the wall, the only thing standing between the free world and a future dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, a totalitarian clique which regards AI as a route to global supremacy and whose true nature has been revealed not just by the Tiananmen Square massacre and genocide in Xinjiang but ever more chilling control of thought and speech.

It’s a prospect that is beyond any dystopia imagined even by Orwell.

So please make the tech giants pay for their own power. Make shareholders own the risk. But build, baby, build. Because the only thing worse than a skyline with data centers is a nation that kept its lovely views and squandered the future.