It’s Not the Data Centers
How to make Americans partners in AI instead of bystanders
September 7, 2026
Our Pennsylvania township hall overflowed with hundreds of angry neighbors. Unable to participate in what had been presented as a public conversation on a proposed data center, we were upset about decisions being made without us and the possible construction of a facility the majority of the community did not want. There had never been a turnout for anything else like this.
This is a common scene across the country. Gallup polling finds seven in ten people oppose a data center in their area. Politicians in both parties are coming out against data centers. July alone saw more than 142 protests in 42 states. Power struggles between interest groups are feeding into economic and political frustration among everyday Americans and combining with rising levels of anxiety as AI disruptions accelerate.
It’s not hard to understand the national mood. AI companies (not their critics) consistently predict unfathomable potential for shareholder profits alongside catastrophic levels of risk for the rest of us. Americans understand they are being asked to host, in their hometowns, machines that will eliminate an unknown number of jobs, upend the labor market, and introduce potential new societal problems nobody can fully predict. All for extra tax revenue? Is it any surprise that most rational people would say, “no thanks”? In August, a developer offered Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania more than $55 million a year in tax revenue and thousands of jobs, and the supervisors rejected it 5-0 after residents came out against it.
The solution is not to change minds. It’s to change what’s on offer.
The solution is not to offer higher incentives, or treat residents as bystanders to be bribed, or to create federal policy aimed at coercing local jurisdictions, or to argue that impacts of the data centers (on water, noise, property values) aren’t as bad as people imagine. The solution is not to change minds. It’s to change what’s on offer. The way forward is to make all communities, and the American people as a whole, partners in the power and promise of AI. Not just sharing the risk, but also the reward. The country needs to envision a new net positive, not to eliminate the perception of a negative.
America needs The National Technology Corps, funded by a modest, micro-assessment on the industry.
The National Technology Corps would be part think tank, part engineering institution. It would be nonpartisan, congressionally chartered, independently governed, with its books fully open for everyone to see. It is a structural, nation-wide mechanism created to harness AI for the good of the nation.
What would the Corps do? Unglamorous, specific things. Clear a permit backlog that runs months because short-staffed offices process applications by hand. Rebuild ambulance dispatching that may be relying on outdated technology. Monitor water systems continuously for the first time, and provide cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. Spot problems and opportunities nobody has yet identified in areas like elder care, medical services, education, nature preservation, and more. It could write federal grant applications that small towns forfeit every year because they have nobody to write them. It would be a resource for anything AI can do that under-resourced citizens say they need. The Corps would not do research or build new models. It would work on last mile delivery, the part of this technology that gets neglected in places the market leaves behind. And it would publish everything, so that whatever serves a valuable role in one town or county is free to the next three thousand.
How would it be run? It would be nationally staffed, locally directed. The Corps would hire and pay AI engineers no county could hire on its own, then dedicate them to where the work is. What they work on is decided by the community through a participatory process, not by Washington. Each community would get a resident field officer, hired locally, whose job is to work with the local board and translate what people need into work engineers can do; the engineers themselves would be national and mostly remote, working closely with the field officers. Universities could supply and draw from this source of new talent. The Corps will recruit engineers the way the National Health Service Corps recruits doctors, with loan forgiveness and multi-year tours. The US has done this before, more than a century ago when Congress put cooperative extension agents in nearly every county, with transformative results.
Funding the Corps would involve a two-tiered approach: national and local. At the national level, the Corps would be funded by a micro-assessment of just 0.1 percent on the estimated $400 billion the tech industry spends annually building U.S. data centers. This would generate approximately $400 million a year, which is enough to staff a national body and numerous regional engineering teams at market salaries, easily collected through a statutory assessment or as a condition of federal permitting.
At the local level, whenever a data center is built, 1 percent of that facility’s commercial-grade computing capacity (measured in megawatts) is permanently reserved for the host community. At a typical data center, this translates into more computing power than Harvard’s entire dedicated AI resource, placed in the hands of a county that otherwise couldn’t afford even a single engineer. The locally guided Corps team and field officers would put that power on any appropriate, local task. And if the town doesn’t use or need all that computing power? The unused capacity is sold on the open market, generating no-strings-attached cash for the local treasury. No complex tax structures required.
None of this changes how a data center gets permitted. Water use, noise, setbacks, and environmental review proceed under the same industrial zoning codes that govern any other facility, decided by the same local boards. The Corps does not influence siting in any way.
All of this points to why the industry should embrace The National Technology Corps. Simply put, it’s the smartest way forward. Americans have shown, under current conditions, they will not allow the scale of AI buildout the industry needs, and resistance to the bribed bystander model is only going to grow.
The data center fight in my township remains unresolved. It’s time for the industry to stop forcing the wrong vision on local communities, and start offering us all a genuine stake in the future.