By Futurist Thomas Frey and Futurist Teresa Grobecker
Something important happened recently that the technology industry would be wise not to dismiss.
Eric Schmidt, one of the most credentialed voices in the history of modern technology, stood before an audience and began talking about the coming AI economy. He was booed. Around the same time, community after community began formally opposing data center projects in their neighborhoods. Zoning hearings packed with angry residents. Elected officials finding reasons to delay permits. Opposition that, six years ago, would have been unthinkable for an infrastructure project promising jobs and tax revenue.
This is not a PR problem. It is a signal. And before the technology industry dismisses it as ignorance or technophobia, it would be worth asking a more honest question: are the concerns people are raising actually true?
On power and water — two of the loudest objections — the answer is increasingly no. And it is time to say so clearly.
Separating Fact from Fiction on Power and Water
The image most people carry of a data center is a decade out of date. The old model — rows of air-cooled servers in raised-floor facilities, drawing millions of gallons of municipal water through evaporative cooling towers and pulling massive loads from the community power grid — is being replaced by something fundamentally different.
The new generation of data centers uses full liquid immersion cooling. Servers are submerged directly in dielectric fluid — a thermally conductive, electrically inert liquid that absorbs heat without any water whatsoever. No cooling towers. No evaporative loss. No municipal water consumption. The water fears that animate so many community opposition campaigns are, for modern facilities, simply not applicable.
The data center of the future doesn’t touch your water supply. It is time the public knew that.
On power, the picture is equally misunderstood. Advanced data centers are being designed and built as behind-the-meter facilities — meaning they generate their own power on-site, through solar arrays, small modular reactors, or other dedicated generation, and connect to the grid as a secondary resource rather than a primary draw. A second grid hookup exists not to consume community power, but to provide backup reliability. The facility is not competing with your home for electricity. It is operating on its own independent power system.
This distinction matters enormously in the public conversation. When community members hear “data center,” they imagine a facility that will overwhelm their infrastructure. The truth, for a properly designed Venture Studio Data Center, is the opposite: a self-sufficient energy island that arrives with its own power and its own thermal management, placing no burden on local grids or water systems.
The responsible path forward is not to build data centers despite community concerns — it is to build data centers that make those concerns obsolete.
The most powerful ventures of the future may emerge not from Silicon Valley, but from communities finally given the tools to build themselves forward.
What Gets Built Inside the Studio
Now that the infrastructure question is settled, the more important conversation begins: what actually happens inside one of these facilities, and who does it employ?
A Venture Studio Data Center is not a coworking space with a server room attached. It is a systematic company-building operation — a machine for turning local talent, local problems, and world-class computing infrastructure into new businesses. And the range of what gets built there is as wide as the problems a community faces.
Consider agriculture. A rural county where farming is the economic backbone has data — soil composition, weather patterns, crop yields, water tables — that has never been fully analyzed. A team of three people inside the studio, with access to AI infrastructure and shared legal and financial support, can build a precision agriculture platform that serves every farm in the region. Yield optimization. Predictive irrigation. Supply chain connections to regional buyers. That company employs local people, solves local problems, and generates equity that stays in the community.
Consider healthcare logistics. A mid-size city with an aging population and an overstretched hospital system has coordination problems that AI is extraordinarily well-suited to solve — appointment optimization, medication adherence tracking, remote monitoring triage. A venture built inside the studio can address those problems specifically, for that community, with knowledge of its geography, its demographics, and its existing provider relationships that no company built in San Francisco will ever have.
Consider workforce training, supply chain transparency, local government efficiency, small business financial tools, rural broadband optimization, and predictive infrastructure maintenance. Every one of these is a venture waiting to be built. Every one of them creates jobs that are meaningful, local, and durable.
The venture studio doesn’t import the future. It grows it from the community’s own soil.
The Accountant, the Lawyer, and the Civil Servant
Let’s be direct about something the technology industry tends to euphemize: a significant number of professional roles that currently anchor middle-class economic life in smaller communities are being automated — not gradually, but rapidly.
The local accountant who has built a practice on tax preparation, bookkeeping, and annual filings is facing a reckoning. AI systems now handle routine reconciliation, regulatory compliance checks, and standard filings faster and more accurately than any human practitioner. The accountant whose identity is bound to those tasks is not wrong to feel threatened. Those tasks are genuinely going away.
But the accountant who joins the studio and levels up becomes something far more valuable than a bookkeeper. They become a fractional CFO for ten companies simultaneously — a strategic financial architect who uses AI tools to serve a hundred clients instead of ten.
The same transformation is available to the general counsel. AI now handles first-pass contract review, standard compliance monitoring, intellectual property filings, and routine legal research with remarkable accuracy. The attorney who only does those things is vulnerable. But the one who steps into the studio and repositions as a legal architect — building the compliance infrastructure for a portfolio of ventures, designing the legal frameworks that new companies need at founding — is not threatened by AI. They are amplified by it. One skilled legal mind, equipped with the right tools and embedded in a venture studio, can serve fifteen early-stage companies that previously couldn’t afford proper legal counsel at all.
And local government deserves a place in this conversation. Municipal governments are under relentless pressure — more services demanded, tighter budgets, aging systems, and constituents whose expectations are shaped by consumer technology that processes requests in seconds. A Venture Studio Data Center positioned as a civic partner can incubate the tools that make local government dramatically more efficient: AI-powered permitting systems that cut approval times from months to days, predictive budget modeling that gives city councils real foresight rather than reactive scrambling, citizen service platforms that resolve routine inquiries without human intervention. The city that partners with the studio doesn’t just attract the facility — it becomes a laboratory for the future of civic technology.
Every community has talent that is being underutilized because the tools don’t exist yet. The venture studio builds the tools.
The future’s greatest job creator may not be big corporations, but the systems designed to continuously launch entirely new ventures.
The Job Engine That Changes the Equation
Here is the part of the AI employment conversation that almost never gets said out loud: a significant majority of the jobs that will exist twenty years from now do not exist today. They will not come from established corporations. They will emerge from ventures — small, fast, problem-specific companies — that haven’t been founded yet, solving problems we haven’t fully named, using tools that are still being built.
The job engine of the future is not the corporation. It is the venture. And the venture needs a place to be born.
If the systematic creation of new ventures is the primary mechanism by which future employment gets generated — and there is a compelling case that it is — then the infrastructure supporting venture creation is as strategically important as any highway system or power grid ever built.
A national network of Venture Studio Data Centers — self-powered, water-independent, embedded in communities that have been left behind by previous technological transitions — is not a real estate concept. It is an economic infrastructure proposal of the first order.
The Proposal Worth Making
The investment is already being made. Hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure spending is committed over the next decade. The question is not whether to build it, but where and under what terms.
Operators who arrive with immersion cooling, behind-the-meter power generation, and a venture studio blueprint are not making concessions to community opposition. They are making a more intelligent investment — one that purchases legitimacy, talent access, and long-term community partnership that a standalone data center, however efficiently built, can never buy.
The communities currently blocking data centers are negotiating — awkwardly, through opposition, because no one has offered them an honest account of what the technology actually does, or a genuine seat at the table.
Offer them the facts on power and water. Offer them the studio. Offer them equity in what gets built.
The boos are not the end of the conversation. They are the opening bid.
“The future is where our children live.” — Thomas Frey. Build it somewhere they can afford to stay.
Related Articles
MIT Technology Review “The NIMBY Problem With Data Centers Is Getting Worse” https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/13/1089650/the-nimby-problem-with-data-centers-is-getting-worse/
World Economic Forum “Venture Studios Are Quietly Reshaping How Startups Get Built” https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/06/venture-studios-startups-innovation/
IEEE Spectrum “AI’s Insatiable Appetite for Power Is Sparking a Community Backlash” https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-data-centers-power-grid