The National Security Case for Building AI Infrastructure in America’s Energy Hubs
The competition between the United States and China for leadership in artificial intelligence is not primarily a technology competition. It is an infrastructure competition. AI capability scales with compute — with the number and quality of AI processors running training and inference workloads. The country that builds more compute, in more secure locations, powered by more reliable energy, establishes a structural advantage that is difficult to overcome through software alone.
The federal government has recognized this. The CHIPS and Science Act, executive orders on AI infrastructure, and Department of Energy investments in data center power infrastructure all reflect a national policy judgment that domestic AI compute is a strategic asset. The question is where that compute gets built — and whether the communities best positioned to host it can create the institutional conditions for it to happen.
Why Location and Power Source Matter for Security
AI training and inference infrastructure that runs on carbon-free baseload power has advantages beyond environmental. Geothermal-powered facilities are not subject to the fuel price volatility that affects gas-fired generation. They are not vulnerable to the weather disruptions that affect solar and wind. They do not depend on long-distance transmission that is subject to physical infrastructure vulnerabilities. A data center running on locally-generated geothermal power, connected to an independent grid, in an inland location away from coastal infrastructure risks, represents a more resilient platform for strategically important compute than facilities dependent on the interconnected and sometimes fragile national grid.
This is not speculative. Grid resilience has become an explicit criterion in federal evaluations of data center suitability for government-adjacent AI workloads. The combination of geothermal baseload, IID’s independent operation, and the BESS that allows the IVDC to ride through grid disturbances creates a resilience profile that dedicated mission-critical computing facilities require.
The Domestic Investment Imperative
Every dollar of data center investment that goes to Ireland, Singapore, or even to states with less developed energy infrastructure represents American AI compute capacity that is less strategically controllable than capacity built in energy-rich domestic locations. The policy goal — which bipartisan consensus in Congress has endorsed — is to bring AI infrastructure investment to American communities where the technical and resource foundations exist.
Imperial Valley meets that description as well as any location in the country. The geothermal resources are unique. The IID grid is independent and domestically controlled. The land is available and appropriately zoned. The workforce is available and motivated. The project has cleared every legal threshold the regulatory system has imposed.
Blocking it — through the kind of coordinated institutional obstruction the IVDC has faced — is not neutral with respect to the national AI infrastructure goal. It is a concrete impediment to building the domestic compute capacity that national policy has identified as a strategic priority. The officials and organizations blocking this project are not making a local land use decision in a vacuum. They are affecting the trajectory of an investment that has national implications.
