AI is Infrastructure

The next power grid isn’t electric — it’s cognitive.

AI will reshape economies, infrastructure, and public life. The question isn’t if we build it — it’s who will own it.

I caught the recent — OpenAI may want government backing for its data centers. Cue the outrage: trillion-dollar companies begging for handouts.

But what if we swapped outrage for opportunity?

This isn’t a crisis waiting to happen — it’s a chance to build together.

These aren’t just “tech projects.” They’re the neural grid of the modern world — the systems that will power health records, logistics, research, and the entire language layer of our economy. Our policymakers are standing on the sidelines, treating collective intelligence like a venture-capital hobby.

We Don’t Need to Offer Grants. We Need to Build Partnerships.

I don’t want government grants for AI. I want a public-private partnership where the returns — economic, civic, and environmental — flow back to the taxpayers who funded the foundation in the first place. If tax dollars are underwriting the future, then we should share the dividend. If public land, energy, and water are powering these data centers, then taxpayers should hold a stake in how they’re built and where they’re built. That’s not radical. That’s ownership. We don’t want to be spectators to a trillion-dollar build-out. We’re investors and will own a seat on the board.

The New Industrialization

If this sounds like the next industrial revolution, that’s because it is.

Let’s build it without repeating the mistakes that defined the last one. The highway system connected America — but it also carved it up. Neighborhoods were split in half, communities displaced, ecosystems paved over. Taxpayers paid for the roads, but private industry reaped the benefits: oil, automobiles, advertising, and the logistics networks that followed. Yes, it built mobility. But it also cemented a pattern — public investment, private profit, and environmental cost.

AI infrastructure is the sequel — only this time, the asphalt is invisible, and the traffic is data.

We’re paving the roads of tomorrow’s intelligence economy right now. The question isn’t whether we’ll build it; it’s whether we will build it better. Because if we’ve learned anything from every industrial era that came before — roads, oil, manufacturing — it’s that “progress” can connect people or divide them. This time, we get to decide which story we write.

Environmental Protection Requires Skin in the Game

Every AI evolution comes with a carbon receipt. Data centers don’t just consume electricity — they devour it. They pull water from communities already in drought and poison groundwater. They push power grids to breaking points, then move on to the cheap plot of land where the communities are not a priority.

Private equity will not fix that.

They’ll simply negotiate better energy rates, build bigger cooling towers, and call it “innovation.” The real innovation would be to build ecological intelligence into the infrastructure itself — sustainable energy loops, closed-water systems, heat recapture, regional reinvestment. That only happens if the public has skin in the game. When we partner, we can set environmental standards as part of the design — not as an afterthought.Because without public participation, AI’s environmental footprint becomes outsourced like every factory, landfill, and refinery that came before it.

We Used to Build for Everyone

We once built infrastructure to serve the whole country — that highways, power lines, and libraries were shared goods, not speculative assets. Now we're on the precipice of outsourcing our cognitive backbone and we'll act surprised when transparency disappears. We're allowing a few companies to control knowledge.

AI systems are the cognitive equivalent of the power grid — and we’re trusting a handful of CEOs to keep the lights on.

Two Proof Points

We’ve seen what happens when critical infrastructure answers only to profit:Texas, 2021: After privatizing much of its energy grid, the state left weatherization optional. When a freeze hit, power plants failed, and millions were left in the dark. The grid collapsed because it was optimized for shareholders, not citizens.

Compare that to the Tennessee Valley Authority, a public-private partnership built under the New Deal. Federally owned but locally managed, TVA reinvests profits into regional infrastructure and environmental stewardship. It survived the same storm because it was designed to serve, not to extract.

The Internet Backbone: The early internet — ARPANET, NSFNET — was publicly funded, open, and resilient. When one node failed, data rerouted. The design assumed collaboration, not competition.

Contrast that with today’s privatized social media, where engagement equals revenue and the public square lives inside a corporate dashboard. When one platform implodes, entire communities vanish. That’s what happens when the infrastructure of dialogue belongs to a company instead of a country. In both cases, the lesson is the same: Resilience comes from shared ownership. Fragility comes from privatized design.

The Dividend Model: Profit for the Public

Let’s design the future of ownership. If taxpayers help fund AI infrastructure, they deserve more than “access.” They deserve yield — financial and societal.

That means:

• Public dividends tied to national AI growth (like Alaska’s oil fund, but for compute). Community reinvestment — a percentage of every megawatt-hour reinvested locally in education, housing, and health.

• Environmental transparency — public dashboards tracking energy, water, and carbon metrics in real time.

• Ethical oversight boards with actual veto power over harmful deployments.

We’ve already proven that when you socialize the risk and privatize the profit, you get fragility. When you socialize the design, you get resilience.

Narrative Consent, Scaled Up

This isn’t just economic policy. It’s narrative consent at a national level. Who decides what “progress” looks like? Who chooses where to build, who to displace, and what story the technology tells about us? If taxpayers are left out of that conversation, then AI doesn’t just learn from us — it learns over us. It edits the public out of the story of its own creation. Real consent means participation, not blank checks. It means our voice is written into the code, the contracts, and the carbon budget.

Designing the Future of Ownership

We can build differently. Let’s treat AI infrastructure like a public utility with private velocity — fast enough to innovate, transparent enough to trust. Write sustainability into every server farm the way we wrote safety codes into skyscrapers. Teach AI what accountability looks like by modeling it in the systems that train it. But first, we must remember what partnership means. It’s not charity. It’s not control. It’s reciprocity — the simple belief that if taxpayers pay in, taxpayers should get something back. Not just something, but ownership.

This isn’t asphalt and overpasses. It’s a living, learning infrastructure — one that generates wealth, data, and power.

So why not design it like the shared investment it is? We all pay in; we all get stock.

When the system grows, the returns flow back — to schools, to communities, to the people who built the backbone of intelligence itself. Because this time, the dividend shouldn’t stop at Wall Street. It should reach the main street that funded the future.

The Takeaway

AI infrastructure isn’t a corporate asset; it’s a civic opportunity. If we build it privately, we’ll inherit the same inequities, monopolies, and environmental wreckage that defined the last century. If we build it collectively, we have a shot at something cleaner — not just in code, but in conscience.

This is the new industrialization age — let's build it with foresight, fairness, and consent.

That’s the kind of intelligence worth investing in.