OpenAI Says It Will Pay Its Own Way

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 4 — OpenAIOpenAI said on Wednesday night that every future compute campus it owns and operates will pay the full cost of the electricity it uses and of the infrastructure needed to serve it, and will not require public officials to sign nondisclosure agreements. It set out the promises in a “National Community Compact,” and in a “Compute Campus Policy Blueprint” it asked federal, state and local policymakers to write rules like them for the whole industry.

OpenAI’s news feed timestamps the post announcing them at 9 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, the night after Texas elected a governor who would pause data centers; the page itself is dated Thursday. None of the three documents mentions the election. The policies had been “in the works since August,” Reuters reported on Thursday, and OpenAI says the announcement “builds on work we began in January.”

The promises are voluntary, and the blueprint says voluntary measures alone “don’t meet the scale of this moment or provide durable confidence to communities.” “State utility commissions should require large electricity customers to cover the costs they add to the grid and protect other customers if a project falls through,” OpenAI wrote in the post. OpenAI wants comparable requirements across the industry, its rivals included; the proposals reflect, the blueprint says, “new commitments we will apply to OpenAI-owned and operated compute campuses moving forward.”

The Promises

Each of those campuses will have its own local compact and report publicly every year, the post said. Before major spending begins, OpenAI will “provide financial assurances so other customers are protected if a project is delayed, reduced, or canceled,” it said. It will also publish site-level water and electricity use and commission independent noise studies.

The compact words the infrastructure promise differently from the post: OpenAI, it says, has “committed to paying the incremental costs of the infrastructure required to serve our sites and the full cost of the electricity we use.” The NDA promise has exceptions, for “legitimate security information, trade secrets, or proprietary or competitively sensitive information.”In JulyThe blueprint says OpenAI voided NDAs in Effingham County, Ga., in July. The compact promises annual public reports on progress; it names no penalty for falling short.

The promises cover only campuses OpenAI owns and operates. The documents do not say which sites count, or whether campuses it develops with partners are included. Pike County, Ohio, one of the two counties the post holds up, is one such campus: SB Energy “will build, own, and operate the data center under a 20-year lease to OpenAI,” OpenAI said in August.

The Asks

The blueprint puts its case plainly: “Large electricity customers, like data centers, must pay their own way.” It asks for “large-load tariffs that require large electricity consumers to pay the incremental costs they create,” a bar on developers requiring public officials to sign NDAs, and public terms for tax incentives, with a way to recover them if a developer falls short. It asks Congress to speed up transmission upgrades, to restore and expand tax incentives for clean electricity, and to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authority to set up a faster connection process for ready-to-build projects. That process would be for projects “that advance national economic, security, or critical-infrastructure priorities, subject to reliability and ratepayer protections.”

Not every ask is a restraint. The blueprint would let campuses connect sooner if they agree to cut demand at certain times, and it argues against “blanket requirements that a large customer build its own power supply.”The ModelIn Effingham, OpenAI’s agreement lets Georgia Power reduce the power it delivers to the planned campus by up to 1,000 megawatts during periods of high demand, the post says.

Large electricity customers, like data centers, must pay their own way.

OpenAI pointed to two counties. In Effingham, the post says, residents helped shape a “$4.8 million grant to provide free school meals for all 14,000 students in the county”; in Pike County, Ohio, families named childcare as a priority, “leading to a joint $6 million commitment from OpenAI and SB Energy.”Effingham’s SumsOpenAI has committed $80 million to community priorities in Effingham, the compact says. At full buildout, the county projects about $66 million a year in payments in lieu of taxes, according to the blueprint.

Effingham has yet to approve the plans: its commissioners on Nov. 3 tabled the site plan for OpenAI’s Project Camellia until Tuesday, Nov. 17, the Effingham Herald reported. “I really appreciate what all of OpenAI has done for us so far, but safety’s got to be number one, and we have to have reassurance of that, and I don’t have that assurance,” Commissioner Roger Burdette said, according to the Herald. The plan contained “no written commitment” to a 20-foot earth berm against noise that Mr. Burdette said he had been promised; the developer’s representative, who called it “a preliminary site plan,” offered the berm after a recess, the Herald reported. Commissioners also said they would discuss a data-center moratorium at their next meeting.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott halted new data-center connections to the state’s grid on Aug. 3, when ERCOT was tracking more than 400 gigawatts of projects seeking to connect, Reuters reported; Gina Hinojosa, who will succeed him, has listed among her priorities for lawmakers an end to data-center companies’ use of nondisclosure agreements, the Texas Tribune reported. Jess Heck of the Data Center Coalition, an industry association, said in a statement quoted by the Tribune that the coalition “looks forward to working with state leadership along with local officials, stakeholders, and Texas communities to continue building trust and supporting responsible data center growth.”

OpenAI’s proposals followed the Associated Press’s calls giving Democrats control of both houses of Congress.

Daily Cortex is written with AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude, and fact-checked with OpenAI’s GPT models.