Remember when they were still trying to sell AI to us as a force for good? Remember the panels and keynotes? Remember the claims that the injection of this still-nascent technology into every aspect of our lives was in the pursuit of noble ends like curing disease and chatting with extraterrestrial beings? Those initial promises are now mostly fuzzy blackout memories, flickering through our collective snake oil hangover. But as more and more American cities snap out of the fugue state and address AI data centers as an urgent environmental and existential threat, it’s full steam ahead on the other side of the fight. This past week has been one of the AI industry’s most “mask off” yet, with fallout from the OpenAI Pentagon deal still ongoing and glowing reports on how the technology is “turbocharging” America and Israel’s attacks on Iran.
But for those who still haven’t connected the dots between these companies and the rise of global fascism, a clarifying connection TechCrunch pulled from a recent Bloomberg story helps spell it all out.
Painting a picture straight out of a Taylor Sheridan series, the Bloomberg piece details the rise of the “man camps” built to facilitate the construction of data centers. Amenity-filled pop-up villages in remote areas used to serve as a carrot for oil industry contractors. The model has since expanded to facilitate crypto mining and, now, propping up the AI industry.
As many of these extractive industry workers come from military backgrounds, the man camp is intentionally similar to that of a Forward Operating Base (FOB). Far from the traditional sort of company town trying to siphon the workers’ wages back via scrip, these man camps offer free steak dinners and rounds of simulated golf to the roughnecks coming in from a long day’s shift of desert construction, Bloomberg reports.
The camp featured in Bloomberg is being built to house and entertain over 1,000 workers needed for the construction of a 1.6-gigawatt data center in Dickens County, Texas. The shantytown will cost taxpayers $132 million in government contracts paid out to a company called Target Hospitality, according to TechCrunch. Though the Bloomberg story skates right past the fact that Target “also does work for the government on immigration detention,” TechCrunch went on to name the facility as the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, which is south of San Antonio. Reopening after Target signed a 5-year contract with CoreCivic in March 2025, the Dilley center has already become notorious for its treatment of the minors it holds in custody—reports of a measles outbreak, harrowing 911 calls about children struggling to breathe, and worm-riddled food just a sampling of the controversies to arise during the center’s first year in operation.
With tech companies budgeting an eye-watering $700 billion for data capacity expansion in 2026 alone and industry evangelists swearing they’re only just getting started, it’s no wonder Target Hospitality would want to try to wash off the stink of that ICE deal with a pivot to data centers. It’s a bountiful future the company’s chief commercial officer Troy Schrenk describes as “the largest, most actionable pipeline I’ve ever seen.”
Will Target Hospitality’s gravy train keep smoothly chugging along as an increasingly pissed and brazen populace makes it clear they want neither ICE nor data centers anywhere near their communities? Guess we’ll all find out together.
Source: gizmodo.com
