The Data Center Reckoning Was Always Coming

Axios just confirmed the part the public keeps paying for: speculative infrastructure gets built first, and the “system” absorbs the stress when the bet goes sideways.

By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord

Thesis

For the last year, we’ve argued that hyperscale data centers aren’t “neutral infrastructure.” They’re a power instrument: private upside, public burden, and a governance system that’s been trained to treat corporate load as destiny.

This week, Axios published an internal confirmation from inside the AI-optimist camp: Disruptive CEO Alex Davis warned investors that too many data centers are being built without guaranteed tenants, that “build it and they will come” is a trap, and that he expects a financing crisis for speculative landlords—while noting the political flashpoint is electricity prices.

Axios: “Exclusive: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers”

Evidence

1) We already mapped the public-side mechanism: cost shifting through “infrastructure.” In Data Centers: Constitutional Crisis and Energy Burdens, we laid out the core structure: hyperscale buildouts stress shared systems (power, land, water), and the financing/policy stack is designed so ordinary ratepayers can end up carrying upgrades while private actors capture the profit.

Axios supplies the investor-side mirror: Davis is saying the speculative middle layer is overbuilding without tenants, while hyperscalers increasingly prefer to own their own data centers. If hyperscalers self-build, then the “landlord” tier becomes structurally exposed—classic real-estate speculation wearing an AI badge.

2) We warned that “AI infrastructure” narratives are often land grabs. In The Stargate Project: A Vision for AI Infrastructure or a Corporate Land Grab?, we argued that when compute gets packaged as inevitable national progress, consent becomes optional and capture becomes normal. Axios doesn’t contradict that—it tightens it. The winners don’t just want compute. They want ownership of the substrate.

3) We explained how refusal gets rerouted into technical lanes. In The Venue Coup, we named the pattern: when the public says “no” in daylight, power shifts the decision into thinner venues—utility commissions, special contracts, jurisdictional pivots—where legitimacy is treated as a technical detail.

A financing crunch makes venue-shifting more aggressive. If speculative landlords hit refinancing pressure, they don’t slow down and reflect. They accelerate. They push for fast approvals, favorable rate structures, and “economic development” exceptions—because delay kills leverage and scrutiny threatens survival.

4) We named the coming blame-laundering machine. In Accountability Sinks: How Power Avoids Responsibility in the Age of AI, we described how modern systems distribute harm while dissolving responsibility. If 2027–2028 becomes a speculative data-center shakeout, that’s exactly what you’ll see: landlords blame the market, utilities blame forecasts, regulators blame “growth,” hyperscalers quietly point out they owned their facilities, and households get told rate spikes are “unavoidable.”

Implications

Axios frames this as an investment discipline warning. We treat it as a governance warning.

If the speculative layer collapses, the fight won’t be framed as “who made a bad bet.” It will be framed as “stabilize critical infrastructure,” “protect jobs,” “keep America competitive,” and “avoid grid disruption.” That’s where cost shifting becomes policy. The public ends up underwriting stranded risk—directly through rates, indirectly through incentives, and politically through weakened veto power.

The most dangerous move is the quiet one: turning a private financing problem into a public obligation while insisting the public had no standing to refuse the buildout in the first place.

Call to Recognition

Our earlier essays weren’t a series of separate warnings. They were one map viewed from different angles: the constitutional stress of subsidies and secrecy, the land-grab logic of “infrastructure,” the venue shifting that routes around refusal, and the accountability sink that ensures the bill arrives without a signer.

Axios just added the missing confirmation from insider Alex Davis—and a clock. If 2027–2028 is the predicted refinancing crisis window, then the next two years are when the narrative battle gets decided: either data centers remain “inevitable progress,” or the public learns to name the structure clearly enough to demand consent, transparency, and non-extractive terms.

Because when the stress hits “the system,” that word doesn’t mean a dashboard. It means people.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
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Book | https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d — My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload.