You asked an artificial intelligence program to plan your vacation, summarize a document or answer a question you used to Google. Maybe you asked it to explain a medical diagnosis in plain English, or just to settle an argument at the dinner table.

All of that data generation happens somewhere.

That somewhere, increasingly, wants to be Carbon and other rural Pennsylvania counties.

The debate over data centers has landed squarely in our backyard, and I have covered numerous events over the last few weeks where the topic has been front and center.

Maybe nowhere has that debate been more visible than in Penn Forest Township, where residents are pushing back against a proposed project near the intersection of Route 903 and Maury Road.

Residents raised concerns about noise, water consumption, electrical infrastructure and what a massive industrial facility might mean for a community that has built much of its identity around tourism and natural beauty.

It is hard to argue with that while standing in the mountains of Carbon County on a crisp morning.

It is also hard to ignore the contradiction most of us carry in our pockets.

Data centers are the physical backbone of the digital world. Every email, every streamed movie and every cloud-stored photo runs through one. Artificial intelligence, the technology that has exploded into daily conversation and daily life, requires enormous amounts of computing power housed in enormous buildings that require enormous amounts of electricity and water to keep from overheating.

That infrastructure has to exist somewhere. The question is, where?

Pennsylvania has become a prime target. The state already has more than 100 active data centers, and developers are proposing dozens more. A recent Quinnipiac University survey of Pennsylvania voters found a majority oppose data centers being built in their neighborhoods, with opposition crossing party lines. The sentiment is genuine and understandable.

But it raises an uncomfortable question: If not here, where?

Every community that successfully blocks a data center effectively pushes it to someone else’s mountain view, someone else’s quiet road, someone else’s backyard. The demand driving those data centers does not go away because a township or borough passes a zoning amendment.

Penn Forest Township’s vice chairman summarized the impossible position many local officials find themselves in when he described their own amended zoning ordinance as the “least worst option.” Pennsylvania’s constitution prohibits municipalities from banning data centers outright, leaving communities to regulate rather than reject.

It should prompt some honest reflection for the rest of us. The convenience of modern life including the streaming, the cloud storage, the always-on connectivity is physical. It consumes land, water and power. It generates heat and noise. And someone, somewhere, lives next to it.

Carbon County residents, and those in surrounding counties, deserve a say in what gets built in their communities and under what conditions. That much is not in dispute.

The harder conversation, the one most of us would rather skip, is about what we are all willing to give up, or give somewhere else, to keep the lights on in our digital lives.