Andrew Schaap is CEO and Board Member of Aligned Data Centers.
The debate over America’s industrial future sometimes gets framed as a choice between two separate paths: to keep rebuilding its manufacturing base or invest heavily in data centers and other digital infrastructure.
That’s a false choice. I believe manufacturing’s next chapter hinges on data centers, the compute layer behind modern factories. They’re central to the fifth Industrial Revolution, which is fusing AI, data, people and processes into a new model for how businesses build and compete.
The countries that control digital infrastructure—and the companies deploying it—are likely to shape the new economy, global trade and major industries for decades to come. That’s why I believe America needs to lead the data center buildout.
Data Centers And The Future Of American Industry
Manufacturing’s competitive edge increasingly depends on the systems that power it. From aircraft and semiconductors to heavy machinery and pharmaceuticals, the strategic sectors that define American industrial power now rely on digital systems alongside physical ones.
Modern factories generate and consume data at every step, with sensors, robotics, AI-powered inspection and real-time analytics woven into the assembly line. All of that requires massive compute capacity. In this sense, data centers don’t compete with factories—they can make the next generation of these facilities possible.
That impact is already showing up on factory floors before a single server comes online. New and expanded manufacturing plants are producing the electrical equipment, cooling systems and other components data centers need. We may call those manufacturing jobs, but in many cases, the demand behind them is the digital infrastructure boom. With many of the data center industry’s manufacturing and supply-chain partners concentrated in North America, that growth is helping rebuild industrial capacity close to home.
The role of data centers extends well beyond manufacturing. They provide the computing infrastructure behind much of the modern economy, supporting services such as e-commerce, social media, digital banking and telehealth, as well as critical systems across the energy sector and national security.
In 2024, data centers directly employed more than a million workers and supported 5.5 million jobs nationwide. Keeping pace with global demand for compute power could require $6.7 trillion in data center investment by 2030. But capital is only part of the equation.
The construction industry alone faced a shortage of about 439,000 workers as of late 2025, mostly in the skilled trades that data center projects rely on. Closing that gap—while also giving workers the skills to operate alongside increasingly advanced automation—is as important as any capital commitment.
Building For The Long Haul
Given how much of the economy now runs on data centers, it’s easy to forget that the sector itself is a new form of industrialization. It offers the same potential to strengthen communities and build the middle class that heavy industry once did.
The data center industry’s mandate is twofold: build the infrastructure America needs to compete, and make sure the communities hosting it come out stronger.
Bringing a data center online requires land, permitting, years of construction and often significant power infrastructure upgrades. Projects can also drive investment in local water, sewer and other infrastructure, while major campuses create demand for construction, suppliers and permanent operations teams. In that sense, data center development resembles earlier forms of industrialization: large capital investments that can reshape local economies and infrastructure for decades.
However, this generation of infrastructure must be built for change. Unlike a mine extracting finite resources, data centers must continually adapt.
For example, our company’s adaptive data centers evolve alongside the workloads they support. By planning for modular design and construction from the start, we can rearrange, change out and expand equipment as customer needs shift. That same mindset guides the work at our Advanced Cooling Lab, where we develop air, liquid and hybrid systems engineered to handle the extreme heat densities that AI and high-performance computing generate.
That long-term view should also shape how facilities consume resources over time. Operators should consider renewable energy, water-efficient cooling and other resource-conscious designs from the outset—not simply as selling points, but as part of the responsibility that comes with operating in a community for decades.
In Loudoun County, Virginia—one of the most mature data center markets in the U.S.—the industry contributed $875 million in taxes in 2024. That was almost 40% of the county’s overall tax revenue, from facilities occupying just 3% of its land.
Data center operators should consider community impact from the earliest stages of site selection and workforce planning. Whenever possible, we redevelop brownfields rather than farmland or green space, turning dormant industrial sites into new economic anchors. Local hiring commitments and workforce pipeline programs can similarly connect residents to careers in a growing industry. The goal is to make community engagement an operating principle, not a box to check after the project is already underway.
What America Needs To Compete
Digital infrastructure now strengthens nearly every strategic sector, so the choice between building it and rebuilding our manufacturing base is a false one. The harder question is how to build it right.
Making that happen will require more than capital and permits. It will require policymakers willing to modernize the power grid, streamline approvals and invest in workforce development at the scale this moment demands.
It will require data center operators who treat community partnership as a prerequisite for growth. And it will require a shared understanding that the right to grow at the pace America needs has to be earned—in the places where these facilities go up, with the people who live there.
The industrial base we need looks different from the one we remember. Factories matter, and so do the data centers that make them competitive, the systems that keep both running and the local economies capable of carrying it all forward.
The data centers that anchor America’s industrial future won’t just be measured by megawatts and square footage. They’ll be measured by the jobs created, the land restored, the energy commitments honored and the communities that ended up stronger by making room for them.
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