Publications

Silicon Frontier investigates how semiconductor manufacturing, cloud infrastructure, and AI computing are transforming land, water, energy systems, and development priorities across the Pacific Basin. The book develops the concept of techno-statecraft to explain how states, firms, utilities, and local governments assemble infrastructure as industrial strategy. Through comparative research in Taiwan, the United States, China, and Southeast Asia, it connects geopolitical competition over advanced technology to the territorial institutions and socio-ecological systems that make technological expansion possible.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The rapid growth of hyperscale data centers has exposed a governance crisis in U.S. land use planning. This crisis stems from a structural mismatch between parcel-based municipal authority and a form of development whose most consequential resource and fiscal effects extend across jurisdictions and regulatory arenas. Drawing on an interpretive review of local regulatory conflicts and a survey of state legislative activity between 2024 and 2026, we have traced disputes across different stages of data center development and examined how state action reorganizes local planning authority. The analysis shows that outdated zoning categories, opaque utility commitments, and infrastructure decisions made outside municipal review constrain public scrutiny before projects become legally and financially entrenched. Communities have responded through rezoning, moratoria, negotiation, denial, and litigation, and states have alternately strengthened oversight and preempted local control. Local reforms can improve regulatory legibility and preserve public leverage, but municipalities cannot govern cumulative regional effects alone. The deeper challenge is institutional: Planners can therefore use local authority strategically while coordinating with utility regulators, water agencies, state legislatures, and regional institutions.

Takeaway for practice: Planners should treat large data centers as utility-scale infrastructure, with land, energy, water, fiscal, and environmental effects that extend beyond individual sites and jurisdictions. Local governments should establish distinct use categories, performance thresholds, and disclosure requirements before applications are filed, while requiring utility consultation, water-capacity findings, interagency referral, and fiscal review for major projects. State and regional agencies should supply cumulative infrastructure data, coordinate grid and water planning, and establish baseline siting and cost-allocation rules. Time-limited moratoria are most defensible when tied to a defined program of code writing and infrastructure study.

This article examines Oregon’s data-center and semiconductor expansion as a process that reorganizes territorial governance and resource systems. Focusing on firms including Amazon, Google, and Intel, it traces the fiscal incentives, utility arrangements, and land-use instruments used to secure large industrial electricity loads. The analysis shows how important decisions increasingly move into contractual, regulatory, and executive venues, accelerating infrastructure deployment while redistributing environmental and fiscal consequences across municipalities, utilities, and regional ecosystems.