(DCNF)—Top artificial intelligence and private equity firms are teaming up with building trades unions to stop states from freezing data center construction.
OpenAI, Blackstone, QTS and SoftBank joined seven union partners to form the American Infrastructure Alliance (AIA), a multimillion-dollar coalition that plans to work with officials in seven states on data center standards in 2027 to head off moratoriums, Axios first reported Monday.
“Blanket bans on necessary infrastructure projects would set back our economy and threaten good middle-class jobs,” Kenneth Cooper, international president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), told Axios.
The alliance is a “high eight-figure campaign” but is not disclosing specific spending amounts, a spokesperson said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“AIA will support standards that ensure that operators pay for the energy and infrastructure needed, protecting households, ratepayers, and local communities from added costs,” the spokesperson added. “More expansive guidelines are forthcoming.”
The IBEW did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Mitch Jones, managing director of policy and litigation at Food & Water Watch, an environmental group that has called for a nationwide moratorium on new data centers, said in a statement to the DCNF that the construction jobs data centers create are “transitory and fleeting.”
“Once centers are constructed, very few jobs remain in the facilities themselves,” Jones said. “Our research has found that as of 2024 there were only 23,000 people working permanently in data centers across the country.”
“The point of a moratorium is to allow for rigorous study to determine if this industry can ever be regulated safely,” Jones added. “This is truly an open question.”
Jones argued that requiring the industry to “pay its own way” or “bring its own power” would not address other concerns, including noise, air pollution, water contamination and the loss of farmland.
“Responsible growth requires clear expectations for everyone involved,” Tag Greason, co-CEO of Blackstone-owned QTS, told Axios.
The coalition plans initial campaigns in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Indiana and South Carolina, according to Axios.
Abbott directed Texas regulators on Aug. 3 to audit every data center seeking to connect to the state’s grid and ordered that no project move forward until the audit is complete.
Data centers account for about 90% of the more than 474 gigawatts of requests to connect to the Texas grid, according to the governor’s office.
Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
“Data centers must pay for their own electric infrastructure, add power instead of only adding demand, reuse their own water, reduce the cost of electricity for Texans, not disrupt residential neighborhoods, and eliminate reliance on outdated taxpayer-funded incentives,” Abbott press secretary Andrew Mahaleris said in a statement to the DCNF on Sept. 22.
The alliance’s Texas affiliate says on its website that it backs Abbott’s push for new data center standards and accountability measures.
Besides the IBEW, the coalition’s union partners include the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers, the International Association of Iron Workers, the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council and ACT Ohio, according to the alliance’s announcement.
A poll of 800 registered Ohio voters conducted in August for the Infrastructure Alliance of Ohio found that 67 percent viewed data centers unfavorably and 18 percent favorably, while 74 percent opposed building one near their community.
Support rose to 60 percent when respondents were told data center companies would cover the full cost of their infrastructure, create jobs, generate tax revenue and protect electric bills, according to the poll.
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced legislation in March that would impose an immediate federal moratorium on artificial intelligence data centers until national safeguards are in place.
More than 500 groups from 47 states, including Food & Water Watch, called in June for a nationwide moratorium on artificial intelligence data centers.
Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who celebrated a $20 billion Amazon data center investment in 2025, signed an executive order in August to tighten the rules for data center development.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
