Taylor Budowich is the founder and president of Innovation Council.
When many teachers in Richland Parish, Louisiana, opened this year’s annual bonus checks, they found them 400 percent larger than last year — reaching up to $50,000, nearly a full year’s pay in one of the poorest corners of one of America’s poorest states. The bulk of the money came from the tax revenue of a single source: the five-gigawatt data center that Meta is building in Richland Parish. The company’s first sales-tax payment, more than $22 million, exceeded the parish’s entire annual tax collection the year prior. For the first time in his 30-year career, the schools superintendent says, every teacher the district interviewed was fully certified.
Most Americans haven’t heard that story. What they have heard instead is that data centers will guzzle their water and spike their power bills — and our politics now reflect that. New York imposed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction, and Democrats in Congress introduced a national moratorium bill. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — up for reelection — is bragging that he’s paused projects across his state. (President Donald Trump pushed back and argued that communities who welcome data centers “are going to be making a fortune.”) Last month, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm warned that the backlash could swing the U.S. Senate race in Ohio, and told artificial intelligence companies to start explaining “who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one.”
AI supporters are losing the argument not because the facts aren’t on their side, but because they keep reaching for the wrong facts — gigawatts, capital expenditure, the race with China — in making their case. Here are three rules for AI companies, and the policymakers who support them, to win the argument that follows.
First: Keep it local. To voters, the new data center in town isn’t a chess piece in a sweeping national strategy — it’s the new neighbor, and one they are skeptical, if not hostile, toward. The question they’re asking is: “What will this mean for me and my community?” In Richland Parish, the answer is teacher bonuses, $1 billion in infrastructure and contracts to Louisiana businesses, and industry scholarships for graduating seniors. In Loudoun County, Virginia — the data center capital of the world — the answer is a residential property-tax cut every year for a decade with data centers funding almost a quarter of the county budget, paying $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they use. Without data centers, the typical Loudoun homeowner would pay about $5,800 more in annual property taxes. So to come back to the question: What data centers mean for you is lower taxes, better services and more jobs for your neighbors.
Second: Address the concerns about power bills and water supply, and do it unequivocally. “Not a single shovel will touch our land, and not a single slab of concrete will be poured, for a new data center that drains our water and our power. Any company that builds here will power our community — not drain it.” That’s different from a moratorium. It’s a guarantee that people’s quality of life will only go up when a data center comes to town.
And, increasingly, it’s already the case on the ground. The newest generation of data centers — like the ones that Nvidia, xAI and Google are building in line with Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge — are adding power to the grid and using closed-loop cooling systems that don’t guzzle water.
In North Dakota, households near one new data center campus are expecting their electric bills to drop by about $250 a year. Oracle’s data center in Michigan will fund 1,383 megawatts of grid batteries, and the company will make minimum payments whether it uses the energy or not. The deal is projected to save existing customers $300 million, and will allow the utility to pause rate increases for two years. In Georgia, a similar agreement will see rates frozen through 2028, at which point residential customers are expected to see $102 in annual savings. Take the concerns seriously and then show how you’re addressing them.
Third: Stop playing defense. Stop talking about data centers like they’re a necessary evil. When you start from an apologetic position, people assume you’ve done something wrong. These projects are revitalizing many towns that have been left for dead.
Make the people demanding data center bans and indefinite moratoriums explain why they’re against the “miracle” in Quincy — a town of 8,500 in central Washington where roughly 30 data centers, paying their own way on power, now shoulder 57 percent of the property taxes, funding a new hospital, high school, library and aquatic center, while driving the poverty rate from 29 percent down to 6 percent.
Make data center opponents explain why it’s a bad thing that Ellendale, North Dakota — “a dying little town” until recently, as locals told the San Francisco Chronicle — was able to escape the death spiral that has claimed so many towns just like it, its sales-tax receipts leaping from $400,000 a year to $3.5 million in the first seven months os 2026, repaving its streets and restoring its historic opera house. Make them explain why other towns shouldn’t have that same shot at a comeback.
Listen first. Then keep it local, earnestly address people’s cost-of-living concerns, and make the other side explain why it wants to reel back the first life preservers anybody has thrown to drowning American towns in decades. That’s how to talk about data centers.
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