The AI Buildout's Dividing Line Is Who Gets to Read the Deal

The thing being argued over is not the data center but the paper it is built on. A developer wants land, a tax abatement, a power line, water; the county wants jobs and a share of the revenue. Those terms get written down once and signed under a non-disclosure agreement — a legal promise of silence — and from then on no one outside the room is allowed to read them. In Wilmington, Ohio, Representative Greg Landsman, whose bill would ban NDAs between tech companies and elected officials, made the point directly.

the way they're doing it, is wrong. — Greg Landsman

The utility bills went up anyway, his congressman says, for terms the bill-payers had never been allowed to read ^[1]. Sealed versus shown. That is the axis on which the American AI buildout is now contested, and it is not the same line as for-versus-against. No one in either camp is campaigning to stop the servers. What has opened up between Washington and the states, town by town, is whether anyone gets to see the terms. In Washington, every instrument issued this year has run one direction. In April the President designated data centers critical national-security infrastructure, a label that fast-tracks approvals by folding the buildout into winning "the AI race" ^[2]. Federal regulators then ordered grid operators to speed AI-related connections at the Energy Secretary's request ^[3], and authorized data centers to plug straight into power plants — a private, parallel grid outside the public one — even as PJM, the regional grid, proposed cutting data centers first in an emergency and the companies called that discriminatory ^[4]. The EPA exempted "islanded" plants — facilities serving a single site like a data center, off the shared grid — from the Clean Air Act's acid-rain program, and proposed dropping the notice-and-comment step, the routine invitation for the public to weigh in before a rule takes effect ^[5]. September ended with a voluntary, non-binding White House accord carrying no mandatory rules at all ^[6]. None of these papers says "conceal." They say speed, security, energy dominance. The pattern is in what each one removes — a hearing here, a comment period there, a public connection to the public grid. The states and towns are running the other way, and writing their direction into law. Governors Maura Healey of Massachusetts and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania signed executive orders banning NDAs between developers and governments, and Healey attached a requirement that communities sign off first.

Unless a community says yes to a data center, we’re saying no. — Maura Healey

More than 300 municipalities have paused data-center approvals outright ^[7]. In Wisconsin, opposition among registered voters hit 70 percent by February, after sales-tax exemptions for the centers cost the state $70 million over two years ^[8]. In Congress, Representative Jamie Raskin demanded information from Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle about their NDAs with officials, and introduced legislation ^[7].

Residents cannot weigh a project’s costs against its benefits, hold their officials accountable or safeguard their own resources when the basic terms are kept secret. — Jamie Raskin

This is not one party's cause. Maryland's Wes Moore backs development only if projects fund their own infrastructure and taxpayers are not left with the bill; Texas' Greg Abbott blocked new centers from the state grid; New York's Kathy Hochul imposed a statewide moratorium; Maine froze approvals for the largest centers ^[9][5][2]. Where disclosure is refused, cash is offered instead. A proposed American AI Infrastructure Compact would trade predictable approvals for transparency and community benefits; NextEra has offered $2.25 billion in bill credits, and Meta returned $2.6 billion to Louisiana customers ^[10]. The honesty runs both ways: the buildout still leads the world ^[11], the pledges are voluntary, and the buying sometimes works. The industry's own fight against the NDA bans concedes what the bans say. The Data Center Coalition opposes them precisely because secrecy, in its telling, is a competitive disadvantage it would rather avoid.

the NDA bill would put Wisconsin at a "competitive disadvantage" related to attracting data center projects. — Data Center Coalition

The industry's own words place the buildout's costs exactly where the states are looking — in the parts of the deal no one was allowed to see.