There is an old rule in epistemology that deserves wider use in technology policy: when a man tells you a category of thing is obsolete, ask what he sells. The answer does not settle whether he is right. Salesmen are sometimes right. But it tells you where to apply pressure, because an argument that conveniently terminates in the arguer’s invoice should be examined at the joints rather than swallowed whole. A genre of essay now circulates widely in conservative media making roughly the following claim. Data centers, the argument runs, are relics of an older computing era, built to run sluggish corporate software for batch reports and billing systems. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is about fast decisions made where the data lives, on the battlefield, on the oil rig, in the vehicle. Centralized facilities can never deliver that speed. Therefore the hundreds of billions of dollars now flowing into American