Field of Dreams

If you build it.

Field of Dreams was never about baseball. It's about people paying twenty bucks to stand in an Iowa cornfield before 1919 — before the Black Sox broke the spell — when a thing could just be good and shared. That's what we've misplaced. Everything's sport now: the politicians, the feeds, the networks picking a side. A whole generation has never seen it any other way — never watched Cronkite, never felt the country pull in one direction the way it briefly did after 9/11.

Here's the turn nobody's making: the buildout could be the cure, not the wedge. We used to compete to land the railroad, the airport, the interstate exit. This is that — and the same CAPEX cycle that built the country before. In 1999 we buried millions of miles of fiber on borrowed money; the builders went bankrupt, the market got torched, the glass sat dark for years — then it got lit, and it's the rail under twenty-five years of growth. AI's data centers are that again. When Bessent says we'll "grow our way out" of $40 trillion, this $1.1 trillion build is the only thing he can mean. Not a forecast. A build order.

So separate the two things people mash together. Be as bearish as you want on the paper — Monday's warning stands, some of it gets torched like the fiber guys. But the build is the most important thing America can do this decade, and whether a few men get obscenely rich — they will, and people will be furious — isn't the issue. The problem-solvers are easy to hate: Musk rubs half the country wrong, Bezos automates the worker who can't leave the line, Dario's a strange bird. But they ship. We pin a halo on MacKenzie Scott for giving away $26 billion, and homelessness and cancer sit right where we left them. The $40 trillion mortgages your grandkids. Not building is the issue.

A country that lets the future get built somewhere else does not keep first-world wages. Which is why it boggles me no governor has looked at a few square miles of empty land — or the federal land next to it, Washington owns plenty — and said I'll build the data center, the nuclear plant, the fiber, if the feds cut the red tape. The land's there. The missing input is nerve.

It'll be messy — we said that yesterday. But when the dust settles the resources are here, on our soil, and we lead the world for fifty years, until space or fusion or the next miracle. Coal mining isn't coming back to West Virginia. Data mining might.

At COAI today: the full Signal/Noise — the fiber parallel, the governor's playbook, and the fifty-year stakes — is live at getcoai.com.

Outsider Labs Advisory →

$1.1 trillion. That's the US data-center build already in the pipeline — roughly 604 projects, about half the planet's facilities on US soil. That's not a tech budget. It's Bessent's "grow our way out," poured into the ground: the largest construction wave since the Interstate, and the fiber boom's sequel. To grow out of $40 trillion, you pour eleven hundred billion in first.

Follow the power, not the model. The binding gate on all of this isn't chips, it's firm power — the US is roughly 90 gigawatts (call it 100 power plants) short by 2030. If you're allocating to the buildout, the scarce asset is the megawatt and the interconnect queue, not the GPU. Own what sits upstream of the rack.

If it's your town, negotiate to be a beneficiary, not a host. The bad early deals socialized the interconnect cost onto ratepayers; the good ones make the hyperscaler overbuild the grid and cut local rates. Demand the overbuild, tax the racks to rebuild aging infrastructure, land the trades jobs — or the project, and thirty years of tax base, moves one county over.

Reprice the trades for your kids and your hiring. The manufacturing jobs Washington keeps promising aren't returning to an assembly line — they're construction, electrical, plumbing, and the crews that run these buildings. You can't download a gigawatt and you can't download an electrician. The build is the labor story of the decade; position for it.

Tuesday, September 1

Where the cycle caught up to us this week.

Aug 20 & Aug 31 → Aug 10. Bessent ("grow our way out") and Trump ("backwards and poor… far lower taxes and jobs all over the place") both arrived, days late, at the frame we ran in Memo to the Governors on Aug 10: the buildout is the growth engine and the reindustrialization, and the towns that host it right get cheaper power and the trades jobs. We'll take the confirmation.

— Harry and Anthony

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