The executive order, the military authority, and the ratepayer scam behind the AI infrastructure boom
AI data centers are being treated like military projects when it comes to permits, environmental review, and federal land – and like private businesses when it comes to who collects the profits.
So I guess we get the worst of both worlds.
Back in July of last year, Trump signed an executive order that invented a brand new category called “Qualifying Projects” – basically any AI data center over 100 megawatts or $500 million in capital. Once a project gets that label, it becomes critical national security infrastructure – meaning the rules everyone else has to follow stop applying.
Environmental review – the federal process that normally requires you to study how a project affects air, water, and wildlife before you build it – gets fast-tracked, and some of it skipped. The Defense Department gets told to identify military land to lease out to private developers. Federal money kicks in – loans, grants, tax breaks.
Nine months later, projects bigger than anything America has ever built are riding that same national security framing.
Project Matador in the Texas Panhandle is the showpiece. It’s co-founded by Rick Perry – Trump’s former Energy Secretary – and Toby Neugebauer, son of a former GOP congressman from Lubbock. The name on its first IPO filing with the SEC – the paperwork they file when raising money from investors – was “the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.”
Plans for up to 17 gigawatts of generation. Four planned nuclear reactors, 93 gas turbines, solar panels, batteries – on about 7,570 acres, 5,236 of them leased from Texas Tech University for 99 years. At full capacity, it would draw more electricity than 1.2 million Texas homes use combined.
Texas regulators approved the gas turbines in February over local opposition. The Sierra Club said the draft air permit didn’t require the best available pollution-control technology for some pollutants – and had no required monitoring of particulate matter, the fine soot that gets in your lungs – in an area surrounded by cattle ranches and a Tyson meatpacking plant.
Hundreds of residents showed up to the December community meeting. The permits got approved anyway.
In Utah, it’s even worse.
Kevin O’Leary – the Shark Tank guy – is building a 9 gigawatt data center campus called Stratos in Box Elder County. Utah’s current total electricity use is 4 gigawatts. The whole state. At full buildout, his one project could use more than twice that.
The vehicle for getting it approved is the Military Installation Development Authority – a state agency originally created to fast-track building on and around military bases – which Governor Spencer Cox is now using to route a Canadian businessman’s private AI data center around normal local zoning and review.
MIDA cut the energy use tax from the standard 6% down to 0.5% – basically eliminating it – and agreed to give back 80% of property tax revenue to O’Leary’s company.
Box Elder County commissioners said publicly they were blindsided. “We’re brought this in the last hour, and we’re expected to hurry,” the commission chair said. More than 80 residents packed the meeting carrying signs that read “people before profits” and “where’s the research.”
In Louisiana, Meta is building a $27 billion AI data center called Hyperion in Richland Parish – a community where nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. The facility will consume roughly twice what New Orleans uses on a peak day.
To power it, Entergy – the local utility – wants 10 new gas-fired plants, three already approved and seven still waiting on a vote. That’s 7,400 megawatts of new generation – more than half of all power Entergy currently produces statewide – plus a $550 million transmission line to carry the power to Meta.
Experts told CBS the cost of that line gets passed on to Entergy Louisiana’s 1.1 million customers. Meaning every regular person who pays an electric bill in their service area subsidizes Meta’s AI factory.
The 15-year contract with Meta is shorter than the 30 to 40 year operational life of the gas plants. So if Meta walks away when its contract runs out, ratepayers could still be paying for the plants for another 15 to 25 years.
Residents already report rust-colored tap water, blackouts, a 600% increase in vehicle crashes from construction trucks, and rents climbing as construction workers price out the locals.
Lisa Hopkins – who lives across the street from the site – told CBS her family’s fuel cost on her power bill is already up $13 a month. She bought her house two years ago.
Look at what these three projects share. Private company, public subsidy. In Utah, tax breaks routed through a state authority – literally a military one – that exists to expedite construction. Permits approved over local opposition under national security framing. Power either built behind the meter – meaning off-grid, paid for by the company – or paid for by ratepayers who never agreed to it.
Environmental review either skipped, accelerated, or watered down. Local government either bypassed entirely or told about the project just a few weeks before they’re expected to approve it. In Texas and Utah, tenants nobody can name. Jobs that mostly turn out to be temporary construction work.
The public-facing story is always “we have to do this to beat China.” The actual structure is “we have to do this to enrich a small number of well-connected people while the rest of you pay for the gas plants.”
“National security” has become the magic phrase that turns any infrastructure project into a permitted one. You don’t need Congress. You don’t need a full federal environmental review. Local approval shrinks to one county vote. You don’t even need to tell the county commissioners what you’re building until a few weeks before the vote.
The same pattern behind Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing used to stand – private donors get access, the public gets asked to cover security, oversight gets routed around – is now being applied to the entire physical infrastructure of American AI.
SOURCES:
White House: Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure
Sierra Club Texas: Project Matador – Trump AI Data Center
E&E News: Texas Approves Data Center Behemoth’s Massive Gas Power Play
Distilled Earth: The World’s Largest Planned Data Center
Tom’s Hardware: Kevin O’Leary’s 9GW Utah Data Center Campus Approved
KSL: Cox Backs Box Elder County Data Center Proposal
Deseret News: Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary Data Center Utah
CBS News: Meta AI Data Center Richland Parish Louisiana
Fortune: Inside Meta’s Chaotic AI Boomtown in Rural Louisiana
Futurism: Meta Hyperion Data Center Louisiana
All4Energy: Meta Data Center to Cause Entergy Bill Increase
Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said all 7,570 acres of Project Matador are leased from Texas Tech – 5,236 of them are, and the rest was bought or is under contract. It also said Utah county leaders heard about the data center a week before they were expected to approve it – the state authority first briefed them on March 25th, about a month before. It also said Toby Neugebauer’s father represented the Amarillo district where the project sits – he represented the Lubbock district. And it said the executive order was eight months old – it was nine.
Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so, which numbers are plans rather than done deals, and where things stood when I wrote this. A few more now say the order fast-tracks environmental review rather than waiving it, that the air permit concerns were the Sierra Club’s and were about the draft, and that the military authority’s tax breaks are in Utah – and one line no longer says the order underpins a half-dozen projects.
Everything I have written about AI is in one place at rachelandthecity.com/the-ai-files.