How the Data Center Dividend Can Make Shiny Happy People
Perspective: Opinion is against data centers. But tech brolionaires are going to throw their love around, take it into your town.
Donald Trump, no doubt jokingly, compared himself to R.E.M. when promoting data centers alongside major tech companies. The aim was to lead the global AI race while preserving local communities. "This is a group that loves local communities," Trump said, but the tech leaders around seemed reluctant to embrace this idea.
Trump insisted that these billionaires would shower the communities with money and build data centers, thus making them "very, very happy." In reality, the tech corporations would pay the communities to accept the resource-intensive data centers. The communities would "shine like gold and silver," according to Trump.
The plan was dubbed a "dividend," echoing Trump's own concept of a "dividend" in politics. However, the local communities are wary of the data centers, with 60% of Americans expressing discomfort at having a new data center nearby. The opposition spans party lines, with Pew Research Center finding that even 54% of Republicans share this sentiment.
Despite this opposition, paying communities to accept unwanted projects has been successful in other cases. In Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, residents were offered $10,000 each if a data center was built, a "dividend" of $165 million over 15 years. However, this proposal did not fully quell the opposition, with many locals still worried about the impact on property values.
While money can buy goodwill, it's not a guaranteed solution. In a Boston experiment, increasing the developer's offer from $1,500 to $3,000 per person only increased support for nearby housing by a modest 2.6 percentage points. In Michigan, surveyed landowners paid at least $1,000 a year were more supportive of additional turbines than those paid less or nothing.
The idea of paying communities for projects like data centers feels tempting, but it may not be a foolproof strategy. In Hazle, the worry isn't that the developer won't pay; it's that they will, and the residents will have to accept the data center that they don't want. Unlike Alaska's annual dividend, which has been successful since 1982, funding a data center is tied to a specific, fixed location, making it harder to implement.
Written by urgent.news from Newsweek's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
