# The Cloud Gets Rich. What Do Its Neighbors Get? A challenge to data center developers: put community prosperity, real decision rights, and your reputation inside the deal. By Tony Greenberg A data center can change the world and still disappoint the people across the street. That is the deal I want to change. I entered this industry 30 years ago and never left; some interesting projects are now taking me deeper into it. Through ImpactSoul, which rehabilitates extractive business models to serve the public good, I want to help connect the wealth compute creates to the wellbeing of the people who live across the street and make it possible. At YOTTA, I spent time with people whose kindness I have known for decades, which is the subject of the companion essay. This one asks what happens when kindness has to survive a refinancing, a leadership change, or a sale. ## Communities help create asset value A project needs land, power, infrastructure, and workers. These are items that are budgeted for up front. But it also needs social license: people willing to live alongside it and share resources. That contribution, previously invisible and taken for granted, now needs its own budget line, as data centers have been put in the political spotlight. Community and infrastructure as a living system. My conviction is that communities that prosper can help projects prosper, but the industry missed 30 years of chances to build trust and now needs to supplement it with verification. We should measure affordability, employment, health, access, trust, and operational results; make tangible commitments; and put money behind them. If there are additional creative bargains like training, affordable compute, a stake in the AI future, let’s map them too. Community wellbeing should be a design requirement, and it should come with honest arithmetic. ## Publish the bargain before the ribbon cutting You are asking people to live beside your ambition. Let them prosper beside it. A developer arrives with investors, engineers, and a forecast, while the neighbors arrive with lives already underway: children, water bills, and a place they intend to grow old. Before asking for approval, explain who pays for power, water, roads, and shared infrastructure, distinguish construction jobs from permanent employment, and identify who is eligible for training and which employers are expected to hire them. Put a budget, a responsible party, a delivery date, and a remedy beside each commitment, and make the obligations survive changes in ownership where the legal structure permits and the agreement requires it. A promise should not get to retire before the community does. Developers need this clarity too, since named obligations can be priced and unnamed ones eventually become surprises, which are delightful at birthday parties and much less so in infrastructure finance. Of the dozens of multi-megawatt projects cancelled and delayed, many wound up moving the goalposts as the political pressure mounted. Both sides need to be honest about the bargain. ## Give people authority they can use In some ways, the anti-data-center protest is an exercise in decentralized power. Overriding their own elected officials, communities are coming together seeking answers. But as decentralized governance is faced with not just saying “no” but finding a path to “yes,” more difficult questions emerge. Who chooses the community representatives, and which decisions do they control? Can they obtain independent advice, can residents challenge or replace them, and what happens when the operator ignores an obligation? Publish those answers; without them, the arrangement is a suggestion box with a wallet attached. Which decisions belong to residents, from conditions to the project itself, is a question for the table rather than a settled answer. For Indigenous and Tribal communities, start with sovereignty: consent, control over data, and the right to refuse belong at the beginning of the conversation. A token does not manufacture consent, and a charity check does not purchase it. The Hoopa Valley Tribe offers a useful example, though at a different scale and for a different purpose than a hyperscale AI campus. Its Acorn network and data center are Tribally operated, and published reporting describes household connections and a continuing expansion program.[1] The lesson I take is about consent and control: infrastructure looks different when the community it touches has a say in how it is built and run. The results still need scrutiny, including who is connected, at what cost, with what reliability, and who remains outside. Local authority should come with the ability to inspect the answer. ## Make the money visible Publish the distribution formula, fees, decision rights, and payments. If you promise affordable compute, show the capacity, eligibility, and price. Protect personal and culturally sensitive information, and make the project economics understandable. Follow the dollars all the way through: project earns cash; contractual obligations are paid; the agreed community share is calculated; authorized representatives decide its use; funded programs report what they delivered. A training budget is an input, a completed course is an output, and a lasting job is an outcome, so they belong in separate columns. The unemployed graduate does not need another photograph of the check presentation. The same discipline applies to the regenerative tomorrow we want compute to serve across medicine and other areas: a clinic with better access, a researcher with affordable capacity, a family with more security. Define the benefit, fund it, and check whether it happened. ## A share of the future, with real rights inside it Shared ownership is one possible mechanism. My proposed community target is participation in one-percent increments toward ten percent based on the tradeoffs and sacrifices made and the mix of grants, earn-ins, and purchases. A broader project float could reach thirty percent in some benefit corp structures. Each increment needs an explicit source of funding, price, allocation rule, and set of rights, because a community discount is a concession borne by someone and not costless generosity. Giving residents a funded benefit is different from asking them to invest their savings, since the second introduces investment risk, and those paths should stay separate. Tokenization may represent equity, debt, revenue rights, or access to compute, which are different claims, and the legal documents and operating structure determine what someone actually owns. A token is a container, and what goes inside can be an enforceable right or a very expensive wish. Who gets paid first, who absorbs losses, and what happens if the operator fails? What can a holder sell, to whom, and under which restrictions? A secondary market requires willing buyers and a functioning, permitted trading arrangement, and a target return is an assumption to test. Nobody gets to promise liquidity because the spreadsheet is wearing violet. My aim is community influence that endures even when individual holdings change, which requires governance documents and enforceable agreements. It will not happen because we say “forever” with conviction. It will happen with both legal and logistical infrastructure to support the commitment. The financial companion shows an illustrative $1 billion project with ownership allocations, cash flows, discounts, and assumptions; it is a model to examine, not an investment offer or a guaranteed outcome.[2] ### Follow the rights. Follow the dollars. The detailed companion separates ownership, sale proceeds, project cash and community distributions. ## Put your reputation beside your promise This applies to the developer, the investor, the operator, and me, whenever I bring people together. Keep our names attached to what we commit to deliver, and build an independently checked record of commitments, performance, failures, and repair. Let communities contribute evidence and contest the record, and give the people responsible a fair opportunity to respond and correct mistakes. Who runs that record is an open design question, and a good one to work out together. That is the reputation economy I want to build: verified conduct shaping who earns confidence, capital, and the opportunity to build again. A team that repairs a failure deserves credit for the repair, though the original failure stays visible. Otherwise, a promise can enjoy a grand launch and a very private funeral: the ribbon gets photographed, and the missing benefit gets referred to another department. ## Beyond traditional accounting to gross domestic happiness Enough time around money teaches you that it can be excellent at accumulating and surprisingly vague about its destination. Families need security, and people need useful work, education, care, and room to enjoy being alive. A developer can earn a return while helping create those conditions; the question is whether the bargain actually does it. Having come looking for a beneficial universe, I naturally ended up asking who had read the contract. The tools exist: [community benefit agreements](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-community-benefit-agreements-are-necessary-for-data-centers/), host-community agreements, and [payments in lieu of taxes](https://fas.org/publication/data-center-community-benefit-agreements/). [The evidence that they hold up is mixed](https://www.notus.org/energy/data-center-deals-cash-donations), especially when a project changes hands. Conscious compute is a term we coined as the data infrastructure equivalent of the benefit corporation. Just as benefit corporations answer to more stakeholders than investors and more measures than profit, conscious compute projects do not optimize only for the cost and uptime operators care about. They are accountable to a larger community of users and neighbors, with more guideposts such as efficiency, security, transparency, and equity, and the people making growth possible can influence the bargain and see a meaningful share of its benefits. Conscious compute is ImpactSoul’s next frontier, and this is the standard I want to help develop. Developers: tell us about your project. Let’s examine the economics, the community’s priorities, and what meaningful participation could look like, and bring the financing structure, the difficult questions, and the promises you are prepared to put your name behind. [Let’s have a real conversation about your data center project](mailto:t@ramprate.com?subject=Data%20center%20tokenization%20and%20community%20participation). The cloud has neighbors. Build a deal you would be proud to explain at their kitchen table. ### About the author Tony Greenberg founded RampRate in 2000 and co-founded ImpactSoul. An investor and impact futurist, he works across technology infrastructure, healthcare, and regenerative enterprise. Active in the data center industry since 1996, he is pursuing structures that connect infrastructure growth with community wellbeing, transparent governance, and shared prosperity. ### Sources and further reading 1. Hoopa Valley: [the Tribe’s account of the digital divide](https://www.hoopa-nsn.gov/bridging-the-digital-divide/); [NTIA’s broadband funding announcement](https://www.ntia.gov/press-release/2022/biden-harris-administration-awards-more-143-million-grants-expand-high-speed-internet-access-tribal); [KIDE’s report on the Acorn data center opening](https://kidefm.org/friday-addition-acorn-data-center/); [ILSR’s interview on Tribal digital sovereignty](https://www.communitynetworks.org/content/not-living-cloud-hoopa-valley-tribe-builds-digital-sovereignty-new-network-hub). These are reported milestones, not an independent audit or proof of equivalence to a hyperscale campus. 2. [ImpactSoul shared-ownership companion and calculator](https://syzygy-who-gets-to-plug-in.eclecticexe.chatgpt.site/shared-ownership.html). All-equity illustrative assumptions; community share, sale proceeds, project cash, and investment returns are distinct quantities.