The New Oil Field

America is building the largest industrial footprint of the century, and most of the country does not want it next door. In a Gallup poll this spring, 71% of Americans said they would oppose an AI data center in their area — more than would oppose a nuclear plant. On Election Day, voters weighed in on 41 local data center measures across ten states. They sided against the data centers in all but one.

It is tempting to read this as reflexive NIMBYism. It is not. It is a rational response to a bad deal.

Look at what a data center actually takes from a community. It takes power: in PJM's capacity auction last December, data centers accounted for nearly all of the projected growth in peak demand, and prices cleared at the cap for the third record year running. Ratepayers cover that. It takes water: roughly 17 billion gallons a year directly, a figure Congress's own researchers expect to double or quadruple by 2028. And it takes tax base: at least ten states each forgo more than $100 million a year in sales tax exemptions for data centers, with Virginia and Texas giving up well over a billion apiece.

What does the community get back? A construction crew that moves on, a small permanent staff, and a higher electric bill.

A data center is an extraction industry. It does not drill for oil. It drills into the grid, the aquifer and the public purse — and ships the product somewhere else.

Two Places That Solved This

We have seen this shape before. A valuable resource sits under public land; private companies have the capital to extract it; the profits threaten to flow out while the costs stay behind. Two places answered that problem well, and their answers still pay out today.

Alaska amended its constitution in 1976 to put at least a quarter of its mineral royalties into a Permanent Fund. The principal is never spent. Since 1982, part of the earnings has gone straight to every resident as an annual dividend — $1,200 this year, $3,284 at its 2022 peak. The fund now holds over $86 billion. In a state not known for its love of government, the dividend is about as untouchable as a program gets, because everyone can see their share.

Norway went further. The state takes a 78% marginal tax on petroleum profits and holds direct stakes in the fields themselves. The proceeds go into the Government Pension Fund Global, which invests abroad and is now worth about $2.3 trillion. A fiscal rule limits spending to the fund's expected real return — roughly 3% a year — so the oil money outlives the oil.

The two models share three ideas worth stealing:

A Compute Royalty

Apply those ideas to the data center boom.

The grid, the water and the land under a hyperscale campus are public resources in every sense that matters. So treat compute like a mineral. Every large data center pays a royalty on the power it draws, set by the state where it operates, deposited into a permanent fund that can never be spent down. The fund invests broadly — including, sensibly, in the AI companies themselves — and pays an annual dividend to residents, with an extra share to the counties and ratepayers who host the load.

The arithmetic is not exotic. Federal researchers project data centers could use around 650 terawatt-hours a year by 2030. A royalty of one cent per kilowatt-hour on that load raises about $6.5 billion a year. Even if demand never grew, saving it for twenty years at a 3% real return would build a fund of roughly $175 billion — and that is before counting the states that redirect part of what they now give away in exemptions.

A penny per kilowatt-hour is small against the value of what those kilowatt-hours produce. Hyperscalers are on track to spend more than $700 billion on capital this year alone. They are not short of money. They are short of permission.

The royalty is not a penalty on the industry. It is the price of consent — and right now, consent is the scarcest input in AI.

Shareholders, Not Spectators

The idea is already in the air from both ends of politics. Senator Sanders has proposed a national AI sovereign wealth fund. President Trump, after meeting with AI executives, said a dividend for data center neighbors "sounds right." Policy shops have proposed returning part of the property tax that counties already collect. The instinct is bipartisan because the grievance is.

What has been missing is the structure. A one-time check buys a news cycle. A local payment invites a bidding war between counties. What Alaska and Norway show is that the durable answer is a fund: a share captured at the source, principal protected by law, returns paid to everyone who carries the cost.

The first trillionaires will almost certainly come out of AI. That is not the problem. The problem is building them on public power, public water and public tax base while the public watches its electric bill climb. Norway decided its citizens would be shareholders in their oil. Alaska decided every resident would get a check. The data center boom gives America the same choice, and the ballot box suggests people already know which answer they want.

The power is ours. The share should be too.