Unpopular Opinion: Take the Data Center Dividend

In De Soto, Kansas, a developer has made local households an offer that would sound like a prank anywhere else: a thousand dollars a year, every year, as a kind of data center dividend, if its data center project goes through. The developer is Digital Realty, and KCTV reports the payments would come from a twenty-million-dollar community investment fund, with the money available for utility bills and property taxes. Some opponents are unimpressed. One told the station the town would not be bought that easily, according to a Kansas Public Radio roundup of the station's coverage. The unpopular opinion is that De Soto should take the money, because the data center dividend on the table is only the beginning of what towns like it could collect.

The backlash has a point

The numbers explain the hostility. Gallup found early this year that 71% of Americans would oppose an AI data center in their area, with 48% opposed strongly. By comparison, 53% said they would oppose a nuclear power plant in their area. Local moratoria on data centers rose from 6 in 2024 to 59 in 2025 and stood at 294 by this August, the institute reports. In a July survey, 73% of Americans said the costs of the buildout outweigh the benefits, and 62% of registered voters agreed that data centers are mostly large technology facilities that use too much energy and water while giving too little back to local communities.

Digital Realty's project is the kind of buildout driving that backlash. The company paid about $474 million for a site at Astra Enterprise Park in De Soto, on the grounds of a former Army ammunition plant, and its plans for the site call for nine buildings across 280 acres in the first phase. It has an energy agreement with the local utility for 600 megawatts of power by early 2028, scalable to 2 gigawatts. Panasonic is already building a four-billion-dollar EV battery plant at the same park.

The dividend model already exists

The Bitcoin Policy Institute's new report offers an answer that neither side of the De Soto fight has fully considered: the data center dividend, a yearly payment to every household in a host county, funded from a fixed share of the property tax revenue the county already collects from the facility. According to the institute, a data center dividend would require no new tax and add no cost for the company building the facility, since the money comes from revenue already on the books.

The report puts numbers on the idea. In West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, a jurisdiction of roughly four thousand households, a data center developer has agreed to pay the local government about ninety million dollars a year. The institute estimates the resulting data center dividend at between $5,600 and $11,200 per household per year. More broadly, the institute estimates a single 1-gigawatt AI data center could generate enough tax revenue to fund a data center dividend of between $4,500 and $8,900 per household per year in a rural county.

The model for the data center dividend is Alaska's Permanent Fund, which captures a share of the state's oil royalties, invests them, and pays part of the returns to residents. The fund has paid a dividend for 44 consecutive years, held $91.3 billion in assets at the end of June 2026, and averaged $1,491 per resident over the past decade. The typical Alaskan household has collected about $3,900 a year over that span, and the report notes that a data center dividend in the average rural host county could pay even more. The fund's architects designed the payout so ordinary residents, not just officials and companies, would see a direct share of the resource wealth.

Refusing is the expensive choice

Moratoria have not stopped the buildout. The report counts more than fifteen hundred American data centers under construction, planned, or land-banked, with 67% headed to rural areas. Data center construction reached an annualized $75.2 billion this July, up 57% in a single year. When one county blocks a campus, the project and its tax revenue simply move to the next county over. The mechanics of the proposal matter here: the county would fund its operating budget first, then remit a fixed share of the remaining data center tax revenue as a data center dividend, so schools, roads, and public safety are paid before households get their cut.

A county could pay the data center dividend as a check or direct deposit, as a credit against property tax or electricity bills, or as an endowment funding scholarships for local graduates. De Soto's thousand dollars a year is modest next to those figures, but it is real money going directly to households, and the unpopular opinion stands: towns in the path of the buildout should be negotiating their data center dividend instead of passing moratoria.

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