After voters rejected data centers in county after county, OpenAI published a post about its community pledges. Schneider argues the companies are underpaying host communities and treating a political fight like an ordinary factory siting.
you make it. Take it until you make it. Exactly. And I
…opportunity, which I hope they don't squander it and become the Luddite of our generation, as opposed to think about this in a more concrete and tangible way, at least incentivize the blue-collar workers, even if the white-collar workers are going to get wiped out by the thing that they built.
…AI done for me? I went through some of these, you know, open AI like community pledges of what, of the amount of money that they've given to like the places they're building data centers. And it's like, it's literally, they put out a blog post yesterday. So this is after the election where they, where they've seen the whole world, the whole country vote down 40 different data center pauses. And they're like, oh yeah, we gave this county $4.8 million and we gave this county $4 million. If you do the division, that is $60 a person in these counties. And like, okay, fine, AI can't change your life tomorrow, but you know what can? Money and like services. And when all you're doing is renovating one rec center for the privilege of building a data center, you're not going to do it. And now the challenge is like because you have not been able to win over the counties, you're facing these statewide, the statewide opposition, these state…
I will say, maybe not disputing anything you're saying about the projects they're building now, but if you look at the data center alley in Virginia, that specific spot has done phenomenally well and basically cutting residential property taxes repeatedly because their commercial property tax…
I think you have to like, I don't want to say you bypass the government, but like if it's just like revenue that goes into the city coffers, like you want something on top of that where the companies like can like control the delivery of the services and it's not, and it's like going above and…
Yeah, I think there are actually two interesting mismatches in that dynamic. One is, of course, the big tech just needs to fork up, right? These numbers are literally the rounding error of the rounding error of the entire size of the project they're trying to build here. When it's sweet, how…