OpenAI signs National Community Compact after local votes

The compact lands two days after a wave of local ballots that read not as a rejection of data centers but as a repricing of them. The measures were mostly limits rather than outright bans: Sunbury, Ohio, banned data centers over 25 megawatts by 79% to 21% after Amazon proposed a $2 billion campus there, while Grove City, Ohio, banned nothing and instead required a public vote on any project over 50 acres, 20 megawatts or 500,000 gallons of water a day. The common complaint was the electric bill — more than 70% of Americans polled said they would oppose a data center planned near them, with rising power prices the top reason.

OpenAI's move is framed as buying a "social license," a term borrowed from mining and energy: consent a community grants over time, which no zoning board can issue and no tax abatement can purchase. The prior industry offer — tax revenue and construction jobs in exchange for tax breaks — is described as no longer on the table. Microsoft's January "Community-First AI Infrastructure" plan and a non-binding White House pledge signed by Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI and Amazon by this fall are presented as the same repricing in action, with costs that used to fall on the community now carried by the companies.

Where the computing goes is not treated as settled. Bans do not make demand disappear, it argues; they move it, with projects pushed out of Sunbury and Hubbard likely to seek counties that still say yes at whatever price those counties set. OpenAI told Fortune the compact has been months in the making and simply puts in writing pledges it has already undertaken at its campuses.