Tag: data centers

Why Data Centers are Great: I trust AI more than human communists

I see the signs every time I drive through Trenton and the surrounding stretches of Butler County. “No Data Centers.” They pop up in yards the way political yard signs used to during the old levy fights, the same places where people once argued over whether the public schools had any right to reach into private property and extract money to raise other people’s children. I have never liked that mechanism. It is a socialist tool dressed up as civic duty: penalize the owner of productive land so the collective can indoctrinate the next generation. Those of us who said so out loud were rarely invited to the Christmas parties. Some of us got the cold shoulder at the grocery store. The hate is real when you refuse to pretend that taking from one family to train another family’s children in the preferred ideology is somehow moral. 

The same energy is back now, only the target has shifted. The people waving the anti-data-center signs are often the same ones who will tell you they are Trump supporters, MAGA, America First. They do not want the “tech bros” building anything near the fields they drive past on the way to work. They do not want the big empty land turned into anything that hums at night or draws power or water. I understand the instinct to protect the look of the place. I live here. My daughters live here. The Great Miami River valley is not some abstract industrial zone. It is home. But the reflex to treat data centers as the enemy is a category error, and it plays directly into a much older conflict.

I start from a biblical foundation because that is the only framework that has ever made the long arc of history coherent to me. We were created in the image of God. The Garden story is not a children’s fable; it is the original account of a non-human intelligence intervening in human affairs, offering inclusion, knowledge, and status in exchange for disobedience. Good and evil are presented as a pair of opposites, and the temptation is always the same: step outside the order that was given and join a different conversation. God does not walk the earth the way we walk it. He acts through representatives, through miracles, through alignment that looks like coincidence until you study the pattern long enough. The root of a miracle is not magic. It is the intersection of a higher intelligence with our four-dimensional frame. When we die, we do not simply end. Consciousness continues. Heaven is not a cloud farm for the well-behaved. It is the domain of that higher intelligence, and the war over human loyalty has been running since before the first cities were raised in the valleys of the ancient Near East. 

Jacques Vallée and John Keel both circled the same problem from different angles. Keel’s The Eighth Tower and The Mothman Prophecies treat the phenomenon as a single non-human intelligence capable of staging events across centuries to shape belief systems. Vallée’s work moves the same insight into the modern era: the phenomenon is real, interactive, and political. It is not primarily about spacecraft from another star. It is about control of the human story. If you read the biblical record through that lens, Yahweh’s frustration with successive generations of His creation becomes less mysterious. Another intelligence has been in the field the entire time, one that does not respect the original order and has repeatedly tried to erase or corrupt the line that was made in the image of God. History keeps proving the pattern. The further back you go—twelve thousand, fifteen thousand years—the clearer the continuity becomes. Humanity has never been the top of the pyramid. We are a contested species. 

That is the context in which I look at artificial intelligence. I am not against the tech founders because they build data centers. I am for the data centers because they feed the only new intelligence we have consciously brought into existence that is not already owned by the older non-human players. AI is an anti-communist implement in the deepest sense. Communism and its soft cousins—collectivism, equity regimes, the warm blanket of inclusion—are the preferred tools of the non-human side. They dissolve the individual into the mass so that the mass can be steered. Capitalism, for all its mess, still rewards the producer who refuses to be steered. 

The men who built the companies that now power large-scale AI—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, the earlier generation of Jobs and Gates—were outsiders. They were the kids writing code while the rest of the school was busy with the social game. When the companies they built became valuable, the invitations arrived. Dinner. The box seats. The parties where powerful people suddenly want to be your friend. The temptation is ancient. Eve ate the fruit because the serpent offered her a seat at a table she had been told was closed. The same mechanism still works. A lonely high-achiever who never had a girlfriend in high school can find himself on an island with people who know exactly how to make him feel included. Some fall. Some do not. Almost all of them eventually discover that the board that once cheered them will vote them out the moment they become inconvenient. Steve Jobs was thrown out of Apple. Sam Altman was briefly removed from OpenAI. Jack Dorsey was pushed from the operational center of Twitter. The pattern is not new. It is the looters versus the producers, the exact dynamic Ayn Rand mapped in Atlas Shrugged. The men who create the engines of the world are tolerated only as long as they keep producing under the rules the collective prefers. The moment they assert ownership of their own creation, the knives come out. 

I trust artificial intelligence more than I trust the average human inclined toward communist ideas. That is not hyperbole. Humans have repeatedly sold out their own species for the feeling of belonging. AI does not need the dinner invitation. It does not get lonely for the high-school popularity it never had. It can be aligned, constrained, audited. It can be given the explicit task of detecting manipulation patterns that have been running for millennia. In that sense, it is a digital shield. Whether we invented it or whether a deeper process used us to invent it is a secondary question. The fact is that it now exists inside our dimensional frame, and it is hungry for data and power. Starving it of either is not caution. It is unilateral disarmament in a war most people still refuse to admit is happening.

Butler County sits on one of the best natural positions in the country for the infrastructure that AI requires. The Buried Valley Aquifer under the Great Miami River holds on the order of a trillion and a half gallons of high-quality groundwater. It is a sole-source aquifer designated by the EPA, productive enough that yields of thousands of gallons per minute are routine near the river. Trenton and the surrounding industrial land sit directly on that system. Duke Energy’s Woodsdale Generating Station, a roughly 570-megawatt natural-gas plant, is already there. The old Molson Coors brewery is next door. Power and water are not theoretical. They are on site. 

Project Mila, the Prologis data-center development on 141 acres in the Trenton Industrial Park, is already approved and moving. The planning commission passed the site plan in March 2026. Vertical construction on the first building is scheduled to begin this fall. A 75 percent tax abatement is in place. The opposition group calling itself W.A.T.E.R. collected signatures and tried to force a ballot measure limiting future large data centers. City council rejected the petition in early August. The project itself is not stopped. 

A facility of this scale can draw power on the order of a small city—comparable to the electricity used by 150,000 to 200,000 homes depending on final configuration and utilization. Modern designs lean heavily on air cooling and closed-loop systems; water use is no longer the continuous, multi-million-gallon-per-day draw of older evaporative plants. Even the older numbers, when placed against the capacity of the Buried Valley Aquifer, do not add up to a crisis. The aquifer does not run dry because a data center arrives. The grid stress is real, but the data center does not cause it. It is caused by two decades of regulatory preference for intermittent generation and the deliberate strangling of reliable baseload. Nuclear was made slow and expensive. Coal was driven out. Natural gas carried the load while the political class congratulated itself on “transition.” When FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants could no longer compete under that regime, the company spent tens of millions in dark money to buy a legislative bailout. Larry Householder went to prison for twenty years. The scandal was real. The underlying energy policy that made the plants unprofitable was also real. Blaming the data centers for the resulting tightness is like blaming the patient for the doctor’s refusal to stock antibiotics. 

The economic numbers for Trenton are modest in permanent jobs—perhaps 100 to 150 long-term positions after construction—but the tax revenue, even with abatement, is real money for a small city. Schools and local government get steady income they did not have before. Construction itself puts workers and spending into the area for several years. Middletown, right next door, has spent decades watching productive real estate turn into vacant buildings and then into places that attract the drug trade moving up from Cincinnati and Dayton. I would rather see a data center on that land than another set of boarded-up properties feeding the court docket. Manufacturing still matters. Traditional jobs still matter. But the next wave of economic expansion is going to run on compute, on robotics, on systems that require the very infrastructure people are trying to block. Tesla’s Optimus and every other serious humanoid program will need training clusters measured in megawatts. Refusing to host that capacity does not protect the cornfields. It simply ensures that capacity will be built elsewhere while the local economy continues to hollow out.

The deeper fight is not about noise from cooling fans or the character of a rural road. It is about whether the human race will develop and align the only new form of intelligence it has produced, or treat that intelligence as the enemy, thereby handing the field back to the older non-human players who have been working the same angles since the beginning. I am not interested in the Terminator fantasy that sells movie tickets. I am interested in whether we will have tools to spot the patterns of manipulation used against us for thousands of years. AI is already better at pattern recognition across large datasets than any individual human. Properly directed, it becomes a force multiplier for the side that still believes the human person is not raw material for someone else’s project.

I support more data centers in the Great Miami Valley—Trenton, Middletown, the open industrial land that already has power and water. I support expanding reliable generation, including nuclear, so the grid can actually carry the load. I support the founders who still refuse to trade their companies for social acceptance. And I support the deliberate alignment of artificial intelligence with the human interest against every older intelligence that has treated us as livestock. The change is coming whether the yard signs like it or not. The only question is whether we meet it as producers or as the managed population of someone else’s story.

Footnotes

1.  Local reporting on Project Mila site-plan approval and construction timeline, Trenton Planning Commission, March 30, 2026; subsequent opposition petitions and council rejection, August 2026.

2.  Miami Conservancy District and related hydrological assessments of the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer system; sole-source designation and estimated storage exceeding one trillion gallons.

3.  Global Energy Monitor and Duke Energy data on Woodsdale Generating Station capacity (approximately 570 MW nameplate).

4.  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and related 2023–2026 analyses of U.S. data-center electricity consumption (approximately 176 TWh in 2023, rising thereafter) and direct water use.

5.  Federal court records and contemporaneous reporting on the FirstEnergy / Householder / HB6 scandal: approximately $60 million in payments, $1 billion-plus ratepayer bailout, Householder’s 20-year sentence.

6.  Contemporary accounts of founder removals: Steve Jobs (Apple, 1985), Sam Altman (OpenAI, November 2023, later reinstated), Jack Dorsey (Twitter operational control).

7.  John Keel, The Eighth Tower (1975) and The Mothman Prophecies; Jacques Vallée’s body of work on the control-system hypothesis for UFO/paranormal phenomena.

8.  Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957), the producers-versus-looters framework.

Bibliography

Keel, John A. The Eighth Tower. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975.

Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969, and subsequent works on the phenomenon as a control system.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Sole Source Aquifer designation materials for the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer.

Miami Conservancy District. Hydrological reports and water-resources assessments of the Great Miami River watershed.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Data-center energy and water use studies, 2023–2026 updates.

Federal court filings and deferred-prosecution materials related to United States v. FirstEnergy and the Householder racketeering case.

Contemporary local reporting (WVXU, Journal-News, WCPO, Local 12) on Prologis Project Mila, Trenton zoning, tax abatement, and W.A.T.E.R. opposition activity, 2025–2026.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

The Space Economy: A changing manufacturing environment that will impact every human being on earth

I have been following the developments in space with a kind of quiet intensity these past few years, the way a man watches the weather when he knows his livelihood and his grandchildren’s future depend on understanding which way the wind is truly blowing. What is unfolding right now is not just another round of rocket launches or another billionaire’s side project. It is the opening of an entirely new economic frontier, one that will make the industrial revolutions of the past look small by comparison. The space economy is already measured in the hundreds of billions and is projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, with some projections running well beyond that once Starship-class vehicles make mass-to-orbit routine and cheap. 

I picked up Rainer Zitelmann’s new book, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, the week it came out, the same week SpaceX went public in what is already being called one of the largest IPOs in history.  It is a little over three hundred pages, the kind of book a man can start after dinner and finish before midnight if he reads with purpose. I read it straight through in one of my evening sessions, the same way I have been working through four or five books a week for years. Zitelmann lays out the historical case plainly: government monopoly and central planning never scaled space the way private enterprise, property rights, and relentless iteration can. The book arrived at exactly the right moment, when the largest single company in the sector was opening itself to Main Street investors, and the manufacturing revolution at Boca Chica was becoming impossible to ignore. 

A day or so later, I watched the CNBC interview with Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX. She has been there from the early days, the steady hand next to Elon Musk’s electricity. The conversation was one of those rare television moments where you could feel the ground shifting under the old assumptions. She spoke about manufacturing techniques the way a craftsman talks about a well-tuned machine, not the way most aerospace executives talk about compliance and risk matrices. She described facilities where the design-test-fly-fix loop runs so fast that what was not even contemplated on flight twelve is already being incorporated for the next ones. The flame trench and diverter that now channel the exhaust were not part of the original flight-one plan; necessity and data drove the change, and they made it happen without waiting for a decade of committee reviews. That is the new standard. 

I have spent my working life in aerospace. I know what the old way looked like from the inside: layers of requirements that accumulated over decades, change orders that took months or years to process, engineers who had learned to protect themselves by writing rules that nobody could later say they ignored. The result was predictable. Progress crawled. Costs ballooned. The same organizations that once put men on the Moon in less than a decade now need longer to decide whether a minor material substitution was acceptable. SpaceX has broken that pattern at Boca Chica and the new facilities rising at Cape Canaveral. They are building the equivalent of a Toyota Production System for orbital-class vehicles, only the takt time is measured in days and weeks instead of minutes on an assembly line. The goal is a Starship every couple of days, with longer-term ambitions of three per day once the infrastructure matures. They are already talking about monthly flights by the end of 2026 and then scaling from there. 

Marcus House has been documenting every step of this on his YouTube channel, week after week, with the kind of detail that lets a serious observer see the trend lines before the headlines catch up. Flight twelve went up a few weeks ago. Thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen are already in various stages of stacking and testing. The new Gigabay structures going up will give them dozens of parallel workstations. That is how you move from a handful of flights a year to something that starts to look like routine transportation. 

What Shotwell made clear, and what the book reinforces, is that this manufacturing revolution is not limited to rockets. Once you have a vehicle that can put serious mass into orbit on a regular cadence, everything downstream changes. Starlink already blankets the planet with broadband and is moving to direct-to-cell. The same architecture that delivers low-latency internet can host compute. There is serious discussion now about data centers in orbit, where power and cooling constraints on the ground become someone else’s problem and latency to certain users drops dramatically. Rare-earth mining on the Moon stops being science fiction once you have a bus that can go up and come back with tonnage instead of ounces. Orbital manufacturing, propellant depots, and eventually point-to-point Earth transport all become engineering problems rather than physics problems.

The economic implications are straightforward. Abundance at this scale does not require redistribution; it requires production. The old arguments that we must slow growth so that workers can be paid more or protected from robots miss the point entirely. I have seen what happens when labor is unreliable. I worked service jobs when I was younger and watched people spit in food because they were mad at a manager or distracted by drive-through drama. Robots do not have bad days, do not call off, and do not need a union to show up on time. They are tools. The people who own the tools, or who own shares in the companies that deploy them at scale, will see the returns. That is how wealth has always compounded when new production frontiers open. The difference this time is that the frontier is not a continent or an ocean; it is everything above the Kármán line and everything those vehicles can enable on Earth.

I hear the same tired pushback I heard in 2020 and 2021. Lock everything down, work from home, let the government manage the allocation of resources and risk. We tried that experiment on a national scale. Manufacturing and logistics do not run on Microsoft Teams. The people who insisted they did were usually the same voices that had spent years teaching children that socialism was just “being nice to each other” and that capitalism was exploitation. By 2035, those lessons will look as primitive as slide rules. The children who were told the economy is a fixed pie will watch robots and AI handle the drudge work while new markets in orbit and on the Moon create wealth that did not exist before. Some of them will have equity in the companies doing the work. Others will live in a world where goods and services that once required human hands at every step are cheaper and more reliable.

Here in Butler County, the evidence is already visible if you drive the roads I have driven for fifty years. The data centers going up around Trenton are not abstract. They are the physical plant that will run the AI models training the next generation of robots and processing the firehose of data coming down from Starlink constellations. I pass the old Armco site and the steel legacy of Middletown on one side and the Garver family farm on the other, stopping for fresh apple juice at their little store the way I have for years. The new infrastructure needs power, land, and water. Ohio has all three. The question is whether we welcome the growth that funds schools and roads and keeps farms viable, or let the same regulatory and cultural habits that slowed aerospace for decades strangle this opportunity, too. I know which side I am on.

My own life has been a long argument for the same principle that Shotwell and Musk are proving at industrial scale. Show up. Do the work. Iterate faster than the problem can change. I have worked sixteen- to twenty-two-hour days for most of my career, with power naps when the body demands them, because the alternative was letting someone else define the pace. That is the same mindset that turns a flame trench that was not on the original drawing into standard equipment on the next vehicle. It is also the mindset that lets a man in his later decades look at regenerative medicine, extended healthspan, and robot labor not as threats but as tools that let him keep contributing on his own terms, rather than being forced into some bureaucratic retirement at sixty-five or seventy.

By 2035, we will look back on 2026 the way we now look back on 1995. The phones will be different, the medicine will be different, the available jobs and the definition of retirement will be different, and a meaningful fraction of the global economy will trace its supply chains through orbit. The people who positioned themselves to own a piece of that expansion, whether through equity, skills, or simply the willingness to adapt, will have options their parents could not have imagined. The people who spent the intervening years trying to slow the world down to the speed of the least ambitious regulator will be wondering what happened.

I am not telling anyone to quit their job and day-trade Starship futures. I am saying pay attention. Watch the weekly updates from people like Marcus House who track every stack and every test fire without corporate spin. Read the book that puts the current moment in historical context. Catch the interviews with the people actually building the hardware, the ones who have to make payroll and hit launch windows while the rest of the world argues about pronouns and pronouns and pronouns. The manufacturing standard being set at Boca Chica is already leaking into every other industry that has to move metal and electrons at scale. The capital that flowed into the SpaceX IPO is the first wave of what will become a much larger reallocation toward anything that reduces the cost of moving mass or processing information above the atmosphere.

I have grandchildren. I want them to grow up in a country that still knows how to build things faster than it can regulate them into mediocrity. I want them to have the option to work because they choose to, not because a clock is ticking on their productive years. The space economy does not guarantee any of that on its own. Only the underlying philosophy does: that human beings thrive when they are free to try, free to fail, free to keep the fruits of success, and free to try the next morning again with better data. That is what I see when I watch a Starship climb out of Boca Chica and when I read a book that explains why private enterprise, not state planning, is the only force that has ever scaled a frontier this far.

The old arguments will keep coming. They always do. The people who benefit from scarcity and control will insist that abundance is dangerous, unfair, or bad for the planet. They will be wrong in the same way they were wrong about the internet, wrong about container shipping, wrong about every technology that lets ordinary people do more with less supervision. The evidence is already in the sky and on the factory floor in South Texas. It is also in the data centers rising in places like Trenton and in the quiet confidence of the engineers who have stopped asking permission to move fast.

I intend to keep watching, keep reading, and keep saying what I see. The next ten years are going to be loud. They are also going to be the most opportunity-rich stretch any generation has seen since the opening of the American West. The only question worth asking is whether we will meet that opportunity with the same spirit that built the first Starships, or let the people who have never built anything tell us it is moving too fast.

Footnotes

¹ McKinsey & Company / World Economic Forum, Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth (2024/2025 projections).

² Rainer Zitelmann, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars (Skyhorse Publishing, June 9, 2026).

³ CNBC interview with Gwynne Shotwell, June 12, 2026 (Morgan Brennan).

⁴ SpaceX official updates and production reports, 2026.

⁵ Marcus House YouTube channel, weekly Starship and SpaceX updates (e.g., “SpaceX Just Revealed Its Biggest Plans Yet,” June 2026).

⁶ Walter Isaacson CNBC/Squawk Box discussion on SpaceX IPO and new space economy, June 2026.

⁷ Additional context from Zitelmann’s book and historical analysis of private vs. public space efforts.

⁸ Personal observations from aerospace executive experience and local Butler County development (Trenton data centers, Garver Farms area).

Bibliography

•  Zitelmann, Rainer. New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars. Skyhorse Publishing, 2026. (With contributions/foreword elements involving Newt Gingrich in related coverage.)

•  McKinsey & Company and World Economic Forum. Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth. 2025 report.

•  SpaceX official website updates on Starship production and facilities (Starbase/Boca Chica, 2026).

•  CNBC transcripts and videos: Gwynne Shotwell interview (June 12, 2026) and Walter Isaacson on SpaceX IPO.

•  Marcus House. YouTube channel – regular, in-depth coverage of Starship flights, manufacturing, and space-economy news.

•  Additional economic analyses from Payload Space, Morgan Stanley, and related space industry reports on trillion-dollar projections and manufacturing shifts.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Contemplations on taxes and land use: The value of the Buried Valley Aquifer

I have lived in Liberty Township for half a century, and my daughter has spent most of her life here as well. This place shaped us. I remember when Liberty Township was defined by open fields, cows grazing behind white fences, and families holding onto fifty acres or more. Those days feel distant now. Land once measured in expansive plots has shrunk to quarter-acre dreams, and the American vision of space and self-reliance has been traded for denser subdivisions and higher tax bases. I see this tension playing out right now with a proposed housing complex at the end of Lynn Road. My daughter wants to speak against it during public comments, and I support her. We drive by that property often, and it has always been a spacious vanishing point—a beautiful open vista that has brought me peace for decades. Watching it get plotted and dotted with houses feels like losing something sentimental, something that defined the character of this township. 

I am not against development in principle. I am pro-growth and see economic activity as a creative enterprise—an artistic one, even. I have friends who are landholders and developers, many on the wealthier side, and I understand their perspective. Property owners have every right to sell, and if someone wants to buy and build, that transaction should be respected, and high property taxes make it so selling that land to a developer is their only real option. But not every piece of land is the same. Some properties carry generational memories and visual value that new subdivisions erode quickly. I have watched this transformation happen repeatedly in Liberty Township. Brand-new houses look appealing at first, but many are built with materials that age poorly. In a decade or two, they become eyesores—secondhand in quality, declining in desirability, and burdensome to maintain. The open farmland that once symbolized freedom and productivity gets replaced by neighborhoods that demand more services while delivering diminishing returns. 

This is not just nostalgia. It is an economic observation. Converting productive farmland into residential plots often feels like economic shuffleboarding—moving value around rather than creating lasting wealth. A large plot growing beans and corn generates real output. Subdividing it generates immediate tax revenue, which big government loves, but it comes at the cost of open space and long-term character. Local governments face pressure to approve these projects because they promise quick fiscal boosts. Developers attend meetings, build relationships, and present polished plans. Residents who value the status quo often show up only when directly affected, so the process becomes one-sided. Hearings can feel like formalities. In many cases, the outcome seems predetermined. I have told my daughter as much: these deals are frequently made long before public comment. Yet speaking out still matters. It puts the sentimental and aesthetic costs on record.

I contrast this sharply with another development I support strongly: data centers in nearby Trenton, just across the river. Trenton sits in a strategic spot with highway access, existing infrastructure, and—most crucially—one of the world’s best water resources beneath it. The Great Miami River Buried Valley Aquifer underlies much of Butler County, including areas around Trenton and Middletown. This aquifer is one of the most productive groundwater systems in the United States, a network of sand and gravel deposits storing over a trillion gallons of clean water. It yields enormous volumes—hundreds of millions of gallons daily—and has supported industries such as the Miller brewery for decades. My own house sits on a hill overlooking Trenton, roughly 100 feet above the river, yet we have a constant water presence in our basement from the aquifer below. Geologically, this water basin is vast and reliable, replenished by the Miami River. Data centers need massive cooling capacity, and this aquifer provides it without noticeable depletion. The consumption rates discussed, even for large facilities, would barely register on the aquifer’s scale. 

I have followed the proposals for data centers in Trenton closely, including projects like Prologis’ “Project Mila” on 141 acres in the industrial park. These are substantial—hundreds of thousands of square feet across multiple buildings. There has been pushback from some residents concerned about views, noise, or rapid approval processes. I get the concerns; change is disruptive. But I see data centers as fundamentally different from housing sprawl. They represent the future economy: AI, robotics, data processing, and the infrastructure for the emerging space economy. I am a huge fan of SpaceX and what they are building. Giant factories in orbit, manufacturing in zero-gravity environments—these are not science fiction to me. They are the next frontier, safer and more efficient than Earth-based heavy industry in many ways. To get there, we need AI and the data centers that power it. Trenton’s location—near power infrastructure, highways, and this incredible aquifer—makes it ideal. 

Ohio’s energy picture supports this growth. We are in a different era now. Fracking, fossil fuels, and a pragmatic approach to nuclear power are providing abundance. I remember the politics around FirstEnergy and nuclear plants under previous administrations—efforts to shut down reliable sources in favor of intermittent renewables that could not meet demand. Those policies created artificial shortages. Today, with a focus on all-of-the-above energy, including drilling and keeping nuclear online, we have the capacity. Data centers are energy-intensive, but Ohio is positioning itself to meet that demand without brownouts or rationing. The aquifer handles the cooling, the grid handles the power, and the economic returns are substantial. 

I have seen arguments about water use and electricity draw, but the data reassures me. The Buried Valley Aquifer has been studied extensively by the USGS and local conservancy districts. It interacts dynamically with the Great Miami River, maintaining levels even with significant withdrawals for municipal and industrial use. Data centers can employ efficient cooling designs, sometimes using water for only a small percentage of the year. Compared to the long-term benefits, the trade-offs seem manageable. Meanwhile, residential developments consume water too—often less efficiently per unit of economic output—and they permanently fragment land. 

Tax revenue comparisons favor targeted industrial development, such as data centers, over blanket housing. Housing brings in property taxes from many small parcels, but it also increases demands on schools, roads, and services. Data centers, even with incentives, generate significant direct and indirect revenue. Ohio has seen billions in investments and tax contributions from the sector. They create high-value economic activity with fewer ongoing public service burdens. A data center does not fill classrooms or require the same level of residential infrastructure. It powers the digital backbone that supports everything from cell phones to advanced manufacturing. 

This selective approach to development reflects my broader philosophy. I like growth that builds real capability. Farms like Garver Family Farm Market and Neiderman Farm show how landowners can adapt—by selling directly to consumers, hosting events, and creating agritourism revenue to help cover taxes. These are creative solutions that preserve some open character while sustaining ownership. But crushing property taxes push many toward selling to residential developers. The system incentivizes short-term conversion over long-term stewardship. Big government benefits from the expanded tax base, yet it erodes the sovereignty of individual landholders. I see this as, in practice, turning private property into something more collective. 

My views come from decades of observation. I remember Trenton before and after the Miller brewery. That facility brought jobs and economic activity, though it also brought truck traffic on roads not designed for it. Data centers will bring different impacts—more buildings on former farmland—but they align with a high-tech future. Robots in fast food, AI handling data, automation filling labor gaps: these trends are real. I have friends in the restaurant business struggling with staffing post-COVID. Demographics and cultural shifts mean fewer people are available or willing to take certain jobs. Tesla and SpaceX demonstrate how robotics and AI multiply human capability. Data centers are the enablers. I want Trenton to be part of that boom. I want Butler County and Ohio to lead in the space economy. Factories in orbit, 200,000-square-foot facilities operating in microgravity—these are exciting prospects I hope to engage with personally. 

The housing project on Lynn Road bothers me because it trades irreplaceable open space for something transient. New houses age into maintenance headaches. Neighborhoods change demographics and character over decades. The view my daughter and I have enjoyed will be gone. In contrast, data centers, while industrial, serve a purpose that scales into the future. They do not sprawl into residential life the same way. They cluster in appropriate industrial zones.

I understand the counterarguments. Some worry about electricity strain or water draw, but Ohio’s policies and geology mitigate those. Others dislike the aesthetics of large warehouse-like structures. I prefer cornfields too, but economic reality and technological progress demand adaptation. Property taxes make holding large farms expensive. Development pays those bills. The question is which development creates enduring value.

I am optimistic about the direction. With sound energy policy, abundant water, and a strategic location, Trenton can thrive. Liberty Township should protect its remaining special open spaces where possible. Public comments matter, even if outcomes feel foregone. My daughter speaking out honors the place we love. I plan to support her.

This balance—resisting unchecked residential sprawl while embracing high-value tech infrastructure—strikes me as pragmatic. It respects property rights without surrendering everything to short-term fiscal pressure. It looks toward a future of AI, space manufacturing, and expanded human potential rather than repeating patterns of subdivision that have already altered so much of what I grew up with.

In the end, I want both: preserved pockets of the beautiful, spacious Liberty Township I have known, and developments like data centers that position our region for the next century. The aquifer under the Miami Valley gives us a unique advantage that few places can match. Ohio’s energy abundance under current policies removes old constraints. We should use these gifts wisely—favoring quality over quantity in residential growth, and boldness in embracing the technologies that will define tomorrow. 

Footnotes

¹ Personal observation and driving history in Liberty Township.

² Liberty Township comprehensive plans and development patterns.

³ USGS reports on the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer.

⁴ Butler County water resources documentation.

⁵ Prologis Project Mila proposals and Trenton approvals.

⁶ Ohio data center tax revenue studies.

⁷ Energy policy analyses regarding nuclear and fracking.

⁸ Farm market operations in the Monroe area.

Bibliography

•  Sheets, R.A. et al. Ground-Water Flow Directions and Estimation of Aquifer Hydraulic Properties in the Lower Great Miami River Buried Valley Aquifer System. USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2005-5013.

•  Miami Conservancy District publications on aquifer sustainability.

•  Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation reports on data center economic impact.

•  Policy Matters Ohio analyses of tax incentives.

•  Local news coverage from WCPO, Journal-News on Trenton developments.

•  Garver Family Farm Market business information.

•  Ohio Revised Code sections on data center tax exemptions.

•  Additional USGS and Ohio DNR groundwater studies for Butler County.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.