Living in Northern Virginia, I watch neighbors attend public meetings, plant yard signs, and line up at zoning hearings to contest new data centers. Their concerns are legitimate. Nobody wants industrial buildings replacing farmland, transmission towers marching across the landscape, or higher electric bills from cooling equipment humming a quarter mile from a bedroom window.

I understand those concerns. I share some of them.

But something troubles me as I listen to these debates. Many of the same Americans who oppose the infrastructure this technology race requires also want the benefits of technological leadership, economic strength, and independence from communist China. That tension points to a larger question — one Christians should reckon with honestly.

Are we willing to look past immediate self-interest and accept the costs this moment demands?

That question is not really about data centers.

It is about stewardship.

The Scale of What Is Coming

The numbers are not speculative. A Goldman Sachs Research report projects U.S. data center power demand will climb from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 66 gigawatts in 2027 — more than double in two years. Data centers already consume 6% of the national electricity supply. Annual global spending on data center construction is approaching $1 trillion, with up to $700 billion anticipated in the United States alone in 2026.

The consequences are acute here in Northern Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers. Data centers accounted for 40% of Virginia’s total electricity consumption in 2024. Three-quarters of Virginia voters blame data centers for rising utility bills. Dominion Energy’s grid was strained so badly in July 2024 that a single voltage fluctuation triggered the simultaneous disconnection of 60 data centers. PJM, the regional grid operator, warns that reserve margins could drop to 8% by 2028 — a level at which reliability cannot be guaranteed.

Those are real problems that deserve real engagement. But the harder question sits on the other side of the ledger.

The Other Side of the Ledger

In my recent book “The New AI Cold War,” I argue that this technology competition is the defining strategic contest of our era. Most Americans think of it as software. Increasingly, it revolves around physical realities: chips, energy infrastructure, and computing power. Whoever controls that physical stack will hold decisive advantages in military capability, economic productivity, and political influence for decades.

China understands this. Beijing invested more than $38 billion in semiconductor equipment alone in 2025, leading the world in chipmaking investment for the third consecutive year. A May 2026 RAND Corporation report describes technological self-reliance as an ideological pillar of national rejuvenation under Xi Jinping, pursued through the full mobilization of China’s government, military, universities, and private sector under a single strategy.

A senior executive at a major high-technology firm — speaking on background in June 2026 — told me that the United States still possesses the world’s best talent, leading supercomputing capabilities, and the most advanced technology ecosystem. Export controls are creating real obstacles for China’s semiconductor advancement. But he warned that China is closing the gap faster than most Americans recognize, and that the U.S. too often lacks coherent long-range strategy while imposing unnecessary friction on domestic manufacturing. His summary was direct: America’s task is to run faster.

China analyst Gordon Chang, interviewed in May 2026, added another dimension: Beijing maintains a near-monopoly on rare-earth processing and critical pharmaceutical precursors — chokepoints no amount of computing power eliminates. Chang also warned that China is winning the information war, a problem worsened by the dismantling of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which he described as unilaterally disarming the United States in the messaging domain.

On the policy front, President Trump’s June 2, 2026, executive order on advanced technology security reflects this dual pressure. The order asks leading technology firms to voluntarily submit frontier models for a 30-day government security review before public release. A companion National Security Presidential Memorandum issued June 5 established a framework for deploying frontier systems across the defense and intelligence communities, organized around four pillars: Adoption, Adaptation, Assurance, and Accountability. Together, the two documents signal an administration pressing for deregulatory speed while confronting the security risks of rapidly advancing technology. Whether America responds wisely is, as I write this, still an open question.

A Biblical Mandate That Cannot Be Sidestepped

Scripture does not leave believers without guidance here. Jesus taught: “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost” (Luke 14:28, ESV). His lesson concerned discipleship, but the principle extends further. Wise people count consequences. They recognize that future blessings often demand present investment.

The Parable of the Talents presses the point. The faithful servants in Matthew 25 invested what had been entrusted to them. The unfaithful servant buried his talent — choosing safety over stewardship. A nation can make the same error: consuming an inheritance it did not build, refusing every cost required to preserve it.

Nehemiah offers the constructive side of that warning. When he arrived in Jerusalem, the walls lay in ruins. Rebuilding was expensive, disruptive, and bitterly opposed. Yet Nehemiah called the people past their discomfort: “Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem” (Nehemiah 2:17, ESV). The wall was not rebuilt because construction was easy. It was rebuilt because stewardship demanded it.

Today’s walls look different. They include reliable energy, secure supply chains, semiconductor production, and the computing infrastructure that increasingly determines who wins and who loses on the world stage.

What Prudent Stewardship Looks Like

None of this argues for approving every proposed facility without scrutiny. Proverbs 24:3-4 describes deliberate, skillful construction — not reckless building and not fearful inaction, but the patient work of those who build for the generations that follow (ESV). Christians who take that mandate seriously should press challenging questions when corporate-scale development reshapes land use, strains water supplies, or drives up costs for working families.

But Christians must also resist a different failure. Measuring every question solely by immediate personal convenience is its own form of unfaithfulness. The generation that built the interstate highway system, constructed the electrical grid, and established the military installations that secured the Cold War did not do so because those projects were painless. They built because stewardship is not merely preserving what exists — it also means constructing what the next generation will need.

Proverbs 13:22 observes that “a good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children” (ESV). That is not a metaphor about financial accounts. It describes the posture faithful people bring to decisions that shape what comes after them.

The Deeper Stakes

Christians should reject both technological utopianism and strategic naïveté. Technology is not our savior. Only Christ fills that role. But believers cannot pretend that decisions made in zoning hearings, utility commissions, and state legislatures carry no weight in the contest between freedom and authoritarianism.

This race is not about computers. It is about who writes the rules for the technologies that will govern commerce, medicine, communications, and military power for the next half-century. If the United States cedes that ground by blocking every infrastructure investment, the gap will not remain empty. Beijing will fill it.

Romans 12:2 calls God’s people: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (ESV). That call to renewed discernment applies directly to how believers engage the hardest questions of any era. The judgment that cannot be computed, automated, or delegated is precisely what this moment demands.

The cost is real. It deserves an honest accounting. But so does the cost of doing nothing.

Christians are called to seek the Lord’s guidance, engage these decisions as responsible citizens, and think beyond the next zoning meeting to the inheritance we are either building or consuming.

That is not a political position.

That is stewardship.