Data Centers: Taxpayers Can Be Victors, Not Victims, in the AI Revolution
Taxpayers should demand accountability, transparency, and fiscal responsibility from both public officials and private sector actors when it comes to any economic development, and data centers should be no different. Governments at all levels have provided productive (and sometimes, less productive) policy paths forward on data centers.
This report is intended to provide lessons that taxpayers across the nation can take to heart as they work to ensure that data centers leave us all better off in the next big step in America’s technologic and economic evolution. It can be done, because it is already being done in many parts of the country.
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Speed to Power: How Electricity Ratepayers Can Win the AI Race
Politicians at the federal and state levels are increasingly hearing from constituents over cost concerns, prompting legislatures to hold hearings and introduce legislation to protect ratepayers, including calls for data center moratoriums. Other states have proposed tax incentives to attract data centers.
There is another policy path forward that protects American taxpayers and ratepayers while enabling economic growth and increasing energy supply to meet rising demand: relieving regulatory bottlenecks that stifle energy infrastructure development and providing the certainty and flexibility for innovative technologies to help meet America’s energy needs.
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So, Policymaker, You Got Cornered in the Grocery Aisle on Data Centers
Dear legislator, a constituent found you somewhere between the cereal and the rotisserie chickens at the grocery store and wants to know why a “giant AI building” is coming.
Constituents are not showing up angry at local town hall meetings because they’ve studied energy load forecasting. They’re reacting to phrases like “power grid,” “water,” “farmland,” “tax breaks,” “big tech,” and asking one basic question: Is this going to cost me money or change my community for the worse?
Here’s how lawmakers can answer clearly and honestly without sounding dismissive, defensive, or like a corporate lobbyist.
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Ohio’s Blueprint: How Market-Oriented Energy Reform Can Help States Win the AI Race
Data centers bring communities billions of dollars in private capital investment, thousands of new jobs, and a steady stream of tax dollars to state and local governments. But they also demand new electricity generation and transmission infrastructure—something that regulatory inertia has made difficult for states to deliver quickly. States that can supply reliable, affordable power on a commercially viable timeline will gain significant competitive advantage. At the same time, they must address the public’s fear that households will ultimately subsidize the energy infrastructure that big tech companies need.
Ohio offers a compelling case study of energy policy reforms and failures for other states to consider. House Bill 15, signed into law in 2025, adopted a successful suite of market-oriented energy reforms—site permitting deadlines, behind-the-meter power rights, brownfield siting incentives, and grid transparency measures—that address critical barriers to new generation. But Ohio’s experience also illustrates the limits of legislative reform when monopolistic utilities resist competition.