October 2026 Issue

October 2026 | EAST COAST EQUESTRIAN 18 By L.A. Berry P onies have a particular talent for escaping after dark. They wait until no one is watching, find the weak, brush-covered board or sagging wire, nose open the gate everyone swore was latched. and quietly make their move. By morning, one pony becomes several escapees, and the chase is afoot. In hindsight the whole ordeal would have been considerably easier to manage with good preventative discipline. There is a lesson there for the extraordinary expansion of artificial intel- ligence and the data centers being built to power it. Only the definition of cover of night looks different. Data center projects can advance behind nondisclosure agreements, private negotiations and layers of corporate and technical opacity that leave the people who will live beside them—and share resources with them—trying to understand what has already been negotiated on their be- half after the damage is done. In the Delaware River Basin, even the agency responsible for protecting the watershed has acknowledged that estimating future data-center water demand is difficult in part because utilities may be bound by nondisclosure agreements with developers. There is something fundamentally backwards about that. It is in its es- sence the permanant cover of darkness. We are routinely told that mass-scale AI is inevitable, as though its size, speed and appetite for infrastructure have been dictated by nature rather than by corporations making business decisions. They haven’t, but the con- sequences will be. How much AI we build, where its data centers go, how they are cooled, how much electricity and water they consume, who pays for the infrastructure they require and what limits are placed upon them are choices being made right now. Something supposedly inevitable should not need secrecy to establish itself. Quite the opposite. The greater the scale When the Water Runs Out AI was built to serve people. As data centers spread across rural America, communities are confronting a harder question: Howmuch land, power, and water should technology be allowed to consume in the name of progress—especially when deals are made behind closed doors, protected by NDAs, and shielded from public accountability.