Mother Jones just dropped its May/June 2026 issue, and the centerpiece is a devastating, on-the-ground investigation of America's AI data center building spree. The headline: "How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale." It reads like a horror story disguised as a business report.

The numbers are staggering. AI data center expenditures accounted for roughly a quarter of all US GDP growth in the first half of 2025. The largest companies collectively spent $400 billion on construction. Total investment is projected to hit $1.6 trillion by 2030. Nearly 2 billion square feet of data center space is in the pipeline.

But the real story is not the money. It is what happens to the places where these things get built.

Holly Ridge, Louisiana

Meta's planned Hyperion campus covers roughly 5.7 square miles of farmland in the Louisiana Delta. Cost: $27 billion. It would house 11 buildings and hundreds of thousands of GPUs. It would consume enough electricity to power New Orleans three times over. Zuckerberg posted an illustration showing the site overlaid on Manhattan, stretching from the bottom of Harlem to the top of SoHo.

The reporter visited Holly Ridge last November. The surrounding parish was in a speculative frenzy. Everything that had not already flipped was on the market. Pecan groves were becoming RV lots. Homes were becoming parking lots or Dollar Generals. The project needs three new power plants, hundreds of millions of gallons of water, a new port, stoplights, sheriff's deputies, laundromats, and thousands of workers housed in man camps with movie theaters and gyms.

All to power chatbots.

The names tell the story

Mother Jones catalogs the branding choices and they are revealing. Sam Altman's Stargate in Abilene, Texas, is "roughly the size of New York's Central Park." OpenAI's Project Jupiter in New Mexico could be larger. Amazon and Anthropic are developing Project Rainier on 1,200 acres outside South Bend, Indiana. Both Zuckerberg and Bezos have AI projects called Prometheus.

Musk named his Memphis AI training facility Colossus. In the D.F. Jones science fiction trilogy, Colossus is the rogue AI that enslaves mankind. Musk's chatbot, Grok, has described itself as "MechaHitler." There are at least five AI companies named for Icarus. Nobody in this industry has read the source material.

Built on the ruins

The investigation documents how AI infrastructure is literally being constructed on the remnants of earlier American industry. OpenAI is sourcing parts from the Ohio plant where union autoworkers once made Pontiac Firebirds. Meta is building a hyperscale campus where Jeffrey Epstein once lived. Microsoft is reopening Three Mile Island. Developers are renovating robber baron-era steel mills for server farms.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright called this "Manhattan Project 2." The magazine describes it more accurately: one of the largest investments of private capital since the transcontinental railroads. Third-party agents stalk bean fields on behalf of anonymous buyers. Utilities keep coal plants online. The White House quietly rewrites nuclear safety regulations. Gas turbine demand has a backlog until 2030.

The take

Two years ago, the question was whether AI would change the world. That question is settled. The real question now is whether the world can absorb the physical cost of making it happen. Data centers that drink a parish dry. Coal plants that come back from the dead to power servers. Small towns bulldozed for facilities whose output is, for now, a better autocomplete.

Mother Jones asks a question the industry would prefer you not think about: when did you suspect it was a bubble? The magazine suggests it was when former Energy Secretary Rick Perry became the face of a $15 billion data center project named after Enrico Fermi.

I suspect the answer will come when the people living next to these facilities realize what they traded for the tax revenue. By then, the pecan groves will already be gone.

Source: Mother Jones, May/June 2026 issue. "How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale."