As opposition to artificial intelligence data centers spreads across rural America, one group is proposing "data center dividends" to counter the backlash by allowing residents to share directly in the wealth generated by the technology hubs.A new report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., proposes that data center dividends are a model that would return part of the property tax revenue generated by AI data centers directly to households living in the communities that host the data centers, potentially providing annual payments of between about $4,500 and $8,900 per household without creating new taxes or increasing costs for developers."Every American deserves to benefit from the AI boom," Sam Lyman, head of research at the nonprofit, told Fox News Digital."It can't just be the developers in Silicon Valley who are becoming wealthy from this revolution.
It needs to be the Americans who are building the county infrastructure that makes these data centers possible in the first place."The proposal comes as opposition to data centers intensifies nationwide, fomented over the past year by a network of socialists and communist nonprofits funded by a tech tycoon, Neville Roy Singham, living in Shanghai, supporting the Chinese Communist Party and a "new world order" promulgated by Chinese leader Xi Jin Ping.The opposition has widened to conservatives and centrists with the report noting that Americans are now more likely to oppose a data center in their community than a nuclear power plant.In a poll earlier this year, Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their area, while only 53% oppose a nearby nuclear plant.
The report says local data center moratoriums have exploded from six in 2024 to 59 last year and 294 last month.Over the past year, groups in the Singham network – including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the People's Forum, CodePink and BreakThrough News – have opposed da...