Data Is the New Oil — And We're Making the Same Mistake

In the 1970s, America woke up to a terrifying reality: the nation that had pioneered the modern petroleum industry had allowed itself to become dependent on foreign oil. The consequences were gas lines, economic recession, geopolitical humiliation, and a decades-long strategic vulnerability that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives to manage.

Today, a new strategic resource is reshaping the global balance of power. It is not buried underground. It is processed in data centers. And the United States is making the exact same mistake it made fifty years ago — letting organized opposition, fear-based politics, and short-term thinking block the domestic infrastructure that the entire economy will run on.

The comparison is not a metaphor. It is a structural parallel, and the stakes are at least as high.

The Lesson We Already Learned

The United States was the world's leading oil producer for most of the 20th century. Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Louisiana built the modern energy economy. American oil fueled two World Wars, powered the postwar industrial boom, and underwrote the middle class.

Then something changed. Starting in the late 1960s, a combination of environmental regulation, anti-drilling activism, declining domestic reserves, and political pressure made it increasingly difficult to develop new domestic production. Drilling moratoriums. Permit delays. Legal challenges. Community opposition. The arguments were familiar: the environmental costs were too high, the local disruption was unacceptable, and someone else would supply what we needed.

By 1973, America was importing roughly 35% of its oil. When Arab members of OPEC imposed an embargo in response to U.S. support for Israel, the result was an economic shock that reshaped the global order. Gas prices quadrupled. Unemployment surged. The Dow Jones dropped 45%. And the United States learned what dependence on foreign-controlled infrastructure actually costs.

By the early 2000s, America was importing nearly 70% of its petroleum. Every barrel shipped from the Middle East was a barrel that funded regimes hostile to American interests, created supply chain vulnerabilities, and transferred wealth and leverage overseas. The wars, the diplomacy, the financial exposure — all of it was the downstream cost of a single strategic error: letting domestic opposition prevent domestic production of a resource the nation could not live without.

The shale revolution eventually reversed the trend. By 2019, the United States was a net energy exporter for the first time since 1952. But that reversal took forty years, required massive technological breakthroughs, and only happened because political leaders finally decided that energy independence was a national security imperative that overrode local objections.

Forty years. That is how long the mistake lasted.

The Parallel

Now replace oil with compute.

In the 21st century, the critical strategic resource is not petroleum. It is processing power — the ability to train AI models, store and analyze data, run the cloud infrastructure that every sector of the economy depends on, and develop the military and intelligence applications that determine national security.

Data centers are where that processing happens. They are the refineries of the information age. Without them, there is no AI, no cloud computing, no modern financial system, no advanced medical research, no precision agriculture, no autonomous defense systems. Every sector, from healthcare to national defense, runs on compute. The nation that controls the most compute capacity controls the pace of innovation.

The structural parallel is almost uncanny. In both cases, the United States built and pioneered the industry. In both cases, organized domestic opposition used a mix of legitimate local concerns and fear-based national campaigns to block development. In both cases, the blocking does not eliminate demand — it simply shifts production to countries with fewer restrictions, less transparency, and strategic interests that are hostile to ours.

Same Playbook, New Target

The anti-drilling playbook of the 1970s and the anti-data center playbook of the 2020s are structurally identical.

The arguments rhyme because the strategy rhymes. In both cases, a real but manageable local concern — environmental impact — is inflated into an existential threat. In both cases, well-funded national organizations amplify local opposition until it becomes politically impossible for elected officials to approve new projects. In both cases, the ultimate beneficiaries are not the communities being "protected" but the foreign competitors who absorb the production capacity America refuses to build.

The key difference is speed. The oil dependency took decades to develop. The compute dependency is materializing in years. AI capability gaps measured in months can translate to permanent strategic disadvantage. We do not have forty years to make this mistake and then reverse it.

The Consequences of Saying "Not Here"

When a community blocks a data center, the compute capacity does not disappear. The demand does not go away. The project moves — sometimes to another county, sometimes to another state, and increasingly, to another country.

This is exactly what happened with oil. Every barrel America chose not to drill was a barrel Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Venezuela drilled instead. The global supply stayed roughly the same. The only thing that changed was who controlled it, who profited from it, and who had leverage over whom.

Today, every gigawatt of AI compute America chooses not to build is a gigawatt that China, the UAE, or Saudi Arabia will build instead. Consider what is already happening:

The pattern is OPEC all over again. The same nations that used oil to project power for fifty years are now building AI infrastructure to project power for the next fifty. And the United States — the country that invented the internet, built the cloud, and created the AI industry — is voluntarily ceding ground because residents in Virginia and Texas and Georgia do not want a building in their county.

Who's Winning the Compute Race

The global compute race is not a future scenario. It is happening now, and America's lead is narrower than most people realize.

The United States currently houses roughly 40% of global hyperscale data center capacity. China is at approximately 25% and growing faster. The Middle East is building from a small base but at a pace that could shift the balance within a decade.

Meanwhile, $85 billion in U.S. projects have been canceled in three years. Nearly half of all data centers planned for 2026 — approximately 7 GW out of 12 GW — have been canceled or delayed. More than 300 anti-data center bills have been filed across 30+ states.

We are watching the early stages of a repeat of the 1970s, playing out in compressed time. The difference is that AI moves faster than oil. A ten-year compute gap cannot be reversed the way a ten-year drilling gap can. The models trained on foreign infrastructure, the talent that relocates to follow the compute, the military and intelligence applications developed overseas — none of that comes back easily.

The Choice

In the 1970s, Americans were told that blocking domestic drilling was about protecting local communities. What it actually did was make the entire nation dependent on regimes that did not share American values, interests, or democratic norms. The cost was measured in wars, recessions, and trillions of dollars in wealth transfer.

Today, Americans are being told that blocking data centers is about protecting local communities. The real question is the same as it was in 1973: if we don't build it here, who builds it, and what power does that give them over us?

The honest answer is China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. And the power it gives them is the power to control the infrastructure that every American hospital, bank, military installation, school, and business will depend on for the rest of this century.

Oil taught us that energy independence is national security. Compute will teach us the same lesson — the only question is whether we learn it proactively or after another forty-year mistake.

Rural Texas, rural Georgia, rural Virginia — these communities are not being asked to sacrifice. They are being asked to lead. The same way Midland-Odessa led the shale revolution and made America energy-independent, Bastrop County and communities like it can lead the compute revolution and make America AI-independent.

The only thing standing in the way is the same thing that stood in the way in 1973: the belief that saying "not here" has no consequences beyond the county line.

It does. It always has. And this time, we cannot afford to take forty years to figure it out.