Judge Glock: data-center construction is up about twenty times in three years. Of course the counties are panicking.

Loudoun County takes about 45 percent of its tax dollars from those buildings and cut the homeowner rate by about 40 percent. He called it a free government.

Judge Glock is an economic historian, the research director at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor at City Journal. Judge is his name, not a title. He lives next door to Loudoun County, Virginia, the data-center capital of the world. This spring he wrote the Loudoun case in City Journal.

On this episode of Counterweight, Glock walks through what is actually inside those buildings, why Loudoun became ground zero, whether other counties can still copy that deal, and why a local zoning vote will not decide the future of AI. The frontier labs spent a year talking as if they were going to eat half of the white-collar jobs, and maybe the planet. A lot of people are treating a county board meeting as a vote on the apocalypse.

Listen / watch: https://www.counterweightpod.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counterweight-with-will-chamberlain/id6803321469

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18jtv7U8cB0IW82qM9xoK8

Judge Glock: @judgeglock on X · manhattan.institute

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

0:00 Teaser

1:07 Host intro

2:52 Judge Glock

2:56 What a data center does

4:11 Why AI needs them

5:14 Cooling and power

6:28 Construction jobs

8:41 Neighbors

12:56 The twenty-times boom

15:14 Loudoun

19:34 Loudoun pushback

21:54 Who pays for power

24:06 Can other counties copy

25:18 Where the backlash comes from

28:55 How counties should bargain

32:15 Federalism

35:47 AI doom talk