A few weeks ago, billboards appeared overnight in Gary, Indiana and Youngstown, Ohio two cities that have endured decades of industrial decline, disinvestment, and broken promises. The signs, erected by Palantir, declare: "AMERICA'S FUTURE." For communities long abandoned by the industries that once sustained them, such a promise is designed to stir hope. But we should not fall for it.

Data centers are essential infrastructure for our twenty-first century economy. The artificial intelligence revolution has created an insatiable demand for computing power, driving a projected $7 trillion in global investment by 2030. This digital infrastructure is as foundational to our economic future as the Interstate Highway System was to post-war America.

But too many communities are treating data centers as a standalone economic development strategy. They are not. A data center alone is not economic development, it is infrastructure, a necessary but insufficient and incomplete condition for sustainable prosperity.

Consider the employment picture. A typical data center employs 50 to 150 permanent workers. During construction, thousands may descend on a site for 12 to 18 months. But once the servers are humming, most move on. The windowless facilities that remain require only skeleton crews, highly automated operations where algorithms, not workers, run the show.

A recent Brookings Institution report, "Turning the Data Center Boom into Long-Term, Local Prosperity," argues that communities now have more leverage than they realize. As AI giants compete for limited land and harder-to-win approvals, the "standard model" of asymmetric negotiations — where powerful tech firms set terms almost unilaterally — may be shifting. Brookings suggest communities can negotiate for workforce development, research partnerships, and genuine economic ecosystem building.

I agree that communities have leverage, and the Brookings framework offers a useful roadmap. But here is where I part company; such frameworks assume a foundation of transparency, trust and capacity that simply does not exist. When deals are negotiated in secrecy, when costs are hidden behind confidentiality provisions, and when Big Tech "dials up stories of corporate citizenship" only after community opposition emerges, we are not witnessing partnership. We are witnessing extraction with better public relations.

Today's data centers extract in ways measured by megawatts and monthly utility bills. In Virginia, which hosts more than a third of the world's data centers, unconstrained demand could drive up energy usage 183 percent by 2040. Regulators recently approved rate increases adding $16 per month to residential bills, while residential consumption has been declining. Advocates warn bills could double or triple, all to subsidize the world's most profitable corporations.

Which brings us back to those billboards. Are companies like Palantir genuinely invested in long-term partnership? Or are they simply in it for the land, the water, and the energy — without regard for the people who call these places home? When a company plasters "AMERICA'S FUTURE" across cities that policy failures and corporate greed have gutted for generations, the burden of proof lies with them.

According to Richard Wilson, City Design Director for Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, "the truth is, data center buildout requires the kind of comprehensive engineering and land policy framework we have not seen since the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s." That initiative (the largest public works project in American history) required coordinated federal standards, state implementation, local planning, and dedicated funding.

But the highway system also offers a cautionary tale. In the rush to build, planners routed expressways through poor and minority neighborhoods where land was cheap and political opposition weakest. Entire communities were severed or destroyed. As Wilson points out, "while we are still enjoying the benefits of the highway system, communities are still dealing with the harm. We cannot afford to repeat those mistakes with data centers."

True economic development requires a dual commitment. First, to workforce development that prepares residents not just for the few permanent data center jobs, but for the broader technology ecosystem such as cybersecurity specialists, HVAC technicians, electricians, data analysts.  Second, it requires cultivating a supply chain of small local businesses ready to provide goods and services to technology-driven economies. Development that fails to build both is not development, it is merely hosting.

For communities like Gary and Youngstown, a tech giant's billboard promising "AMERICA'S FUTURE" can feel like salvation. But salvation is not short-term construction jobs, minimal permanent employment, rising utility bills, and generous corporate tax breaks. That is simply extraction in a new form. America's struggling communities deserve strategies where data centers are one piece of a larger vision, not the vision itself. The billboard may promise the future, but without transparency, trust, and genuine partnership, that promise will prove as fleeting as the construction crews who built it.

Alejandra Y. Castillo formerly served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development.