Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said there is "no question" that AI data centers will be treated as critical infrastructure, Nextgov/FCW reported Wednesday. A designation of that kind would put the facilities, and the companies that run them, in the same category as water systems and financial services, sectors the federal government considers vital enough that their loss could harm national security.
What Happened
Himes, D-Conn., spoke Oct. 21 at a Brookings Institution event on data centers and the 2026 midterm elections. He said AI data centers will be even more important than the network data centers of the past 40 years because "so much more functionality is going to rely on their health and existence," Nextgov reported.
He said securing them will require key services to "fragment and disperse" so that critical functions are redundant and protected. As AI agents and the wider economy come to depend on the facilities, he said, they will look more like JPMorganChase's resilience centers than today's data centers, adding that operators "haven't had to think in those terms quite yet."
Why It Matters
The U.S. divides its critical infrastructure into 16 sectors, from water and wastewater to information technology and financial services, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, overseeing their security, Nextgov noted. AI data centers already underpin some of those sectors but are not a standalone one.
Himes' remarks come from a senior member of the committee that oversees U.S. intelligence agencies, and they frame AI computing capacity as a national security asset. For data center operators, cloud providers and the companies that rely on them, that view points toward designing facilities around redundancy and physical protection rather than cost and speed alone.
The concern is not abstract. In March, Iranian drones struck Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and a commercial data center in Bahrain, and Russia and Ukraine have recently traded strikes on data centers in each other's countries, Nextgov reported. The Primary Wire has reported on a drone strike that knocked out a Yandex data center and on an Iranian official's threats against cables and data centers.
The Cost Fight
Himes also addressed local opposition to data centers over power and water use. He called the backlash "driven by an eminently solvable problem," namely how to divide fairly the costs of building computing capacity, and said construction will continue because demand for computing "still looks infinite," according to Nextgov.
He said the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bipartisan bill the House passed overwhelmingly last month that would require data center builders to pay for their electricity, "wasn't meaningful or substantive." The Senate has not voted on it.
What to Watch
Himes described the designation as a matter of time; Nextgov did not report any bill or executive action to create a separate data center sector. Signals to watch include any congressional proposal or CISA move to treat AI data centers as their own sector, Senate action on the Ratepayer Protection Act, and whether large operators begin publicly describing redundancy plans of the kind Himes outlined.
