US President Donald Trump has suggested data centre developers pay local residents direct dividends to win support for new projects. “If companies want to make their data centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend,’” he wrote on Truth Social, adding that he had watched highly unpopular projects become extremely popular once a financial deal was struck, and concluding that companies should “MAKE DEALS, and get them built!”
Developers already make community proffers, often totalling millions of dollars in donations and infrastructure funding, but direct cash to residents is newer and is being tested. In Pennsylvania, NorthPoint Development reportedly offered residents in Hazle Township 10,000 dollars each as part of its campaign for the Project Hazlenut campus, an offer some residents called a bribe. In Kansas, Digital Realty offered every household in De Soto 1,000 dollars in utility and property tax credits for ten years, where it plans a 600 megawatt campus across 1,440 acres outside Kansas City.
Trump cited operators covering their own grid infrastructure costs, which he said he had mandated. Datacenter Dynamics noted the Rate Payer Protection Pledge is not a regulatory requirement, that several states and utilities have introduced local large load cost rules, and that a national Ratepayer Protection Act failed to pass the US Senate in October. The president announced no plan to mandate dividends.
A September report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute proposed a yearly household dividend funded from a fixed share of property tax revenue a county already collects from a data centre, structured as a check, direct deposit or tax and utility credit.