As Democrats show increasing hostility to the artificial intelligence and energy industries, Republicans have an opportunity to fight for American technological supremacy while also benefiting many of their constituents. The next type of computing will be dependent on geography that naturally advantages rural areas in red America and could revive local economies with mostly conservative residents.

A combination of land prices, grid capacity and the simple physics of heat dissipation provide a huge natural advantage to developing red states. Google signed a massive $4.3 billion deal this month to reopen a nuclear power plant in Iowa and upgrade reactors in several other states, with the tech giant entering into a 20-year power purchasing agreement. Electricity from the first of the upgraded plants is expected to be delivered in 2028.

At the same time, new data centers planned to be built by 2028 sit on average 175 kilometers from major cities, versus 46 kilometers for the last generation. In other words, they’re becoming more rural. This naturally favors Republican dominated states, because the center of the AI revolution’s infrastructure increasingly relies on their favorable geography, instead of the physical location of software engineers.

Moreover, companies want to build in red America, where acreage is cheap, electrical transmission infrastructure can be added without multi-year litigation and industrial power prices remain competitive. Locations with a friendly regulatory environment and available land will have a huge advantage to get new investment. It’s the digital equivalent of moving a steel mill closer to its supporting coal mine to reduce transportation costs.

Analyses by the commercial real estate firm JLL found that the vast majority of new data centers under construction will be in states that voted for President Trump in 2024. Two-thirds of proposed U.S. facilities are headed for rural counties, largely in the South, as part of a new great migration of business. The rural economic boom from this will be enormous, and going forward many Republican voters will reap the dividend.

Loudoun County, Virginia, which is currently the largest concentration of data centers in the world, will get $1.3 billion in taxes from data centers and related industries next year. That is roughly 40 percent of the county’s revenue, according to The New York Times. That windfall has funded new schools, recreation centers and road work. It also cut residential property taxes by 30 percent. Local officials claim data centers support 15,000 jobs in the broader economy. After all, before the model can run somebody has to mine, refine and manufacture the materials!

Geography isn’t the only factor of course. Red-state utility commissions and legislatures have compounded these natural advantages by moving faster on permitting and other legal concerns. But favorable natural and regulatory environments cluster in places that voted Republican in the last several election cycles, not in blue America.

A recent study by the Pacific Research Institute found that software engineer-heavy and Democrat-led California illustrated the issue in stark terms. The Golden State has pursued aggressive mandates and regulations aiming for 100 percent green electricity by 2045, while shuttering the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. This has created structural power supply shortfalls that cap the growth of data centers, as these facilities cannot function on unreliable solar and wind alone.

Democratic-led energy policies resulted in higher costs and greater legal risks, and ultimately lost economic opportunities. Despite California’s historic status as a tech hub, these foolish policies function as a de facto veto on a key source of future economic growth, a veto potentially more durable and widespread than an outright prohibition.

Ideological constraints on energy threaten to hand a strategic advantage to foreign competitors such as China who have no qualms about expanding their energy supply or computational power.

And many Democrats aren’t just thwarting progress with regulatory hurdles but are pushing outright bans. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. (I-Vt.) Bernie Sanders proposed another Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Center Moratorium Act in July, which would impose a “temporary” federal pause on the construction of new AI data centers and the expansion of existing ones. This would effectively cede the likely future of the global economy to their far more pro-technology ideological fellow travelers in China.

America leads the world in AI software, algorithms and frontier model development, giving it a decisive edge in the intellectual software race against China. Yet even left-wing groups like the Brookings Institution admit this advantage is increasingly at risk of being neutralized by blue State energy infrastructure failures driven by restrictive energy policies that prioritize intermittent renewables over reliable power.

A data center can sometimes be built in as little as two years, but the major electrical transmission lines and substations often take up to 15 to construct. This means that a major bottleneck is policy.

Without abundant, affordable and always-available electricity, even the best AI models cannot scale to the massive compute clusters required. Democrats have handed Republicans a political win on a silver platter, if the Republicans are wise enough to push back with a strong pro-growth stance that disproportionately enriches red state economies, while also ensuring U.S. technological dominance. Republicans should pounce on this one. Andrew Follett conducts research analysis for a nonprofit in the Washington area.