The current American debate over artificial intelligence, or superintelligence for those so inclined, is entering a period of political sorting, as the meaning of being “pro-AI” or “anti-AI” begins to take shape within the country’s two major political coalitions.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers a useful comparison. Political attitudes toward COVID did not emerge fully formed. President Trump accelerated vaccine development, while Republican governors exercised sweeping emergency powers during the pandemic’s early months. Experience with mandates, restrictions, and their social consequences hardened the now-familiar partisan alignment. For the Right, the task is to turn AI’s demand for American land, energy, and labor into lasting benefits for American communities.

One direction of this political sorting is already visible on the socialist Left. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have introduced legislation which would implement a maximalist regulatory ban, pausing artificial intelligence development with a twenty-year prison sentence for non-compliance.

The COVID comparison cuts in another direction. Right-leaning states such as Texas initially used broad emergency powers, issued stay-at-home directives, and backed quarantine enforcement with criminal penalties. Those positions changed as Americans accumulated experience with the institutions, policies, and social consequences surrounding the pandemic.

Take my home state of Missouri. No one would mistake it for a blue state. In August 2025, the city of St. Charles, in a county Trump carried by seventeen percentage points in 2024, became the first city in the nation to impose a citywide moratorium on data-center construction. Less than a year later, the city went further and effectively banned data centers altogether. Yet, only a few counties west, Republican Governor Mike Kehoe joined Google executives in May of 2026 to announce a $15 billion data-center investment in Montgomery County, calling the project “more than infrastructure” and “an investment in Missouri families, communities, and long-term opportunity.”

The split is revealing. Even within one deeply Republican state, AI infrastructure is producing two competing conservative instincts: suspicion of large-scale technological disruption and enthusiasm for investment, growth, and reindustrialization. The eventual conservative position on AI will have to reconcile both.

Big Tech bears responsibility for much of the backlash to the data-center buildout. To many residents, data centers are the physical manifestation of job displacement and economic upheaval. In St. Charles, the use of a nondisclosure agreement helped fuel residents’ concerns about transparency and local control.

And can skeptics of AI even be blamed? The legacy technology industry’s relationship with Middle America has been extractive for decades. Too much of its vaunted innovation has meant easier access gambling, addictive doomscrolling, and neurotic antisocial proclivities. Then there is censorship. During COVID, platforms policed the boundaries of acceptable discourse, suppressing skepticism toward claims presented as undeniable truths.

But “Big Tech” is becoming an increasingly imprecise description of the technology industry now taking shape. The Silicon Valley economy associated with social media, digital advertising, and West Coast software campuses is no longer synonymous with the emerging world of artificial intelligence. A different strain of the technology industry increasingly speaks the language of factories, energy, industrial capacity, and national power. Even legacy technology companies are being pulled toward this new political economy by AI itself. Google’s provision of Gemini for Government through the Pentagon’s GenAI.mil platform offers one example of this alignment between technological development and national power.

For much of the software era, a company could employ globally sourced workers in a handful of coastal Californian cities, concentrate ownership and wealth, and sell digital products everywhere else. Americans could supply their attention, personal data, and consumer spending habits without those companies making a comparable investment in their communities.

Superintelligence changes the dynamics in this relationship. Its infrastructure requires enormous quantities of power, land, labor, and physical capital. The next technological revolution will not remain confined to Silicon Valley. It will increasingly be built across America.

This growing dependence on physical infrastructure creates an opportunity to renegotiate the relationship between American technology and the physical country which will sustain it. Billions of dollars in capital expenditure are moving into the Midwest, South, Appalachia, Mountain West, and rural America. Communities previously peripheral to the technology economy are becoming indispensable to it.

But physical presence and a new strategy alone will not repair the relationship. A hyperscale data center employing relatively few permanent workers, consuming enormous quantities of electricity, and returning little visible benefit to its host community can easily reproduce the same extractive relationship within the confines of ominous and looming concrete castles filled to the brim with humming computers. The question is not whether Big Tech builds in Middle America, but whether Big Tech builds up Middle America. The motto should be simple: build up communities, not around communities. This means giving residents a meaningful say in development, preparing local workers for skilled jobs, and ensuring American households do not shoulder the infrastructure costs of the buildout.

Vice President JD Vance captured the emerging conservative synthesis best at the American Dynamism Summit last year, describing himself as belonging to both the “techno-optimist” camp and the “populist right.” As Vance put it, “…the history of American innovation is that we tend to make people more productive, and then we increase their wages in the process… the role technology plays in a labor market, and whether we greet innovative breakthroughs with excitement or with trepidation, depends on the purpose of our economic system in the first place.” His broader point concerns the purpose of technological development: innovation earns public confidence when it visibly improves Americans’ economic and communal lives.

The “techno-optimists” and “populists,” as Vance described them, need not remain two separate factions within the MAGA coalition, nor do I expect them to. Technological progress can satisfy the techno-optimist desire to build while meeting the populist demand for a reindustrialized economy oriented toward American workers, productive capacity, and national power.

As the Left pushes restrictions on AI development and infrastructure, the Right, too, will sort itself. I expect it to fully emerge as the coalition of reindustrialization, innovation, energy abundance, and technological sovereignty, committed to an America capable of leading rather than enduring the next technological revolution. But this outcome will have to be earned in the communities hosting the buildout.

Political sorting is occurring on both sides of the relationship. The Right is deciding what kind of technology industry it is willing to embrace. The technology industry, meanwhile, is deciding what kind of political economy it wishes to join.

Figures such as Alex Karp, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey already point toward a different model from the legacy institutions of “Big Tech.” Their companies and public personas vary considerably, but their conception of technology places greater emphasis on the physical world: factories, energy, advanced manufacturing, and national power matter. The software engineer and the Gilded Age industrialist are beginning to converge.

Legacy Big Tech now faces a starker choice. Put hyperbolically, it is a choice between Marxism and MAGA: between remaining attached to a hostile political movement whose socialist wing seeks to halt advanced AI development and embracing a coalition increasingly organized around reindustrialization, technological supremacy, and military power.

There are already promising signs of the latter. Google’s $15 billion Missouri investment, for example, comes alongside commitments to expand the state’s skilled-trades workforce and support AI education and training. Such investments offer a model in which technological expansion builds human capital alongside compute.

For legacy Big Tech, embracing this new political economy requires more than moving servers and job training into the heartland. It requires confronting the reasons many of those communities distrust the technology industry in the first place. A company cannot spend decades treating much of the country as a source of data to harvest and dissent to suppress, then arrive with a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project and expect gratitude. Big Tech must reckon with its past and champion free speech even when doing so carries political costs. This commitment must survive changes in political power as House Democrats are already strategizing to seek retribution against companies merely cooperating with the Trump administration.

The choice belongs to both sides. The populist Right must distinguish between the technology industry it learned to distrust and the industrial future now emerging from it. Legacy Big Tech must decide whether it wishes to remain culturally anchored to the political economy of its past or become a champion for the revitalization of the country.

For Silicon Valley, the best place to start is by reckoning with its relationship with the rest of America and offering a new one: not merely investment, and certainly not charity, but championship. After all, Middle America was once the Western Frontier. From this same St. Charles, Missouri, Lewis and Clark departed into the unknown more than two centuries ago. Today, AI is pulling Silicon Valley back toward the land from which it emerged. The opportunity is to build with Middle America as equal partners in a shared national project. But Silicon Valley will only win over the heartland by helping it prosper.