GoKawiil30 Jun, 2026 • Winston Yau, Matt Haugen, Jesse Goldstein, Dustin Mulvaney, Hannah Story Brown, Kenny Stancil, Sarah Knuth
Executive summary
The recent explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) and the construction of data centers threatens to swallow the US economy and transform society. The stock market and its AI-driven rally has dazzled investors with an endless wave of asset price appreciation. Yet despite all of its science fiction hype, the actual implications of the AI buildout are increasingly socially and ecologically destructive. Coupled with what projects to be long-term global economic and supply chain disruptions stemming from the US-Israeli war on Iran, the rise of AI portends increasing precarity for the global working class.
We believe that AI’s emergence shows the potential for state capacity to be oriented toward a different mission that centers the ambitious creation of socially useful green infrastructure like clean energy, healthy schools, libraries, social housing, and public transit. While we recognize that it is tremendously difficult to mobilize sufficient capital toward pro-social ends, the state-supported AI buildout offers a glimpse of the possibility that a transformed state could orient its significant market-shaping and worldmaking capacity toward the public good.
The AI and data center buildout is not the spontaneous outcome of an imagined “free market.” It is the result of political decisions past and present: subsidies, tax rates, infrastructure, deregulation, and an absence of regulation in the first place. Instead of anything resembling public control over economic and industrial planning, we are witnessing a corporate takeover of state capacity.
In this report we detail three key ways in which the federal government is facilitating the AI boom:
AI First national strategy: Asserting the AI “race” as a national strategic priority by entrenching it within the state bureaucracy and propping up the industry’s business model through government procurement, particularly in militarism and surveillance. This also entails weakening and neglecting to enforce antitrust law and a revolving door of influence peddling that allows AI-investors to shape federal policy from within, resulting in a sense that AI is too strategic to fail. Antisocial infrastructure: Dismantling environmental protections and accelerating permitting reform in the name of “removing red tape” and warping electricity infrastructure around data centers. This entails boosting and selectively refusing to regulate fossil fuel power plants and backup generators that opens up hundreds of billions of dollars in additional revenues for data centers. It also includes demanding that costly and inefficient coal, oil, and gas plants delay their retirement, which—if expanded across all carbon-polluting plants slated for retirement—could potentially cause $3 billion in costs to ratepayers and cause tens of thousands of excess deaths, alongside enormous additional health damages from particulate and ozone pollution each year they remain open. Paying for the party: Enacting corporate-friendly fiscal and market policies, such as low corporate and high-earner tax rates that allow for significant cash reserves to be deployed and used as collateral. For example, just three of the companies driving the AI boom (Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet) avoided $50 billion in federal taxes in 2025 alone. This strategy also includes providing infrastructure tax breaks and public subsidies, and intervening domestically and internationally to “secure” the natural resource base for critical minerals, semiconductor supply chains, and the rest of the AI technology stack.
Loading graphic… The federal government enabled three companies to avoid $50 billion in taxes in 2025 alone, increasing cash reserves for rapid AI buildout. All three Alphabet Meta Amazon Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon owed $ 65 billion in 2025 at the full corporate tax rate of 21%. They paid only $ 15.3 billion… and pocketed
$ 49.7 billion for corporate AI buildout instead of public goods.
Source: Climate and Community Institute and Revolving Door Project, using data compiled by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Data center illustration by macrovector on Magnific.
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