The Meter Runs One Way
Towns across the country are blocking data centers because the math only runs one direction. There is a Depression-era American fix for exactly this, and it already has a name.
Denver paused new data center permits for a year. Camden County, on the Georgia coast, did the same, the first community on that coastline to do it. A cluster of counties around Chapel Hill followed. A record number of these projects were canceled in the first three months of 2026, and the list of towns saying no keeps getting longer while at least eleven states weigh temporary bans of their own.
What they are turning down is a particular arrangement. A facility arrives, the town absorbs the strain on its water, its grid, and its land, and the revenue books somewhere else entirely.
Consider what one large facility asks of the place that takes it in. A single data center can drink up to a billion gallons of water a year, and as much as 2.7 million gallons on a hot day, often in counties already under drought restrictions. In Bessemer, Alabama, residents stalled a project that would have needed roughly two million gallons a day, enough to supply two-thirds of the city. The power draw is large enough to reorganize how a utility plans, and household bills have been climbing in the same years these campuses arrive. Ask a resident what the town got back and the answer is usually a tax break, relatively few permanent jobs, and a long gray building set behind a berm.
Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that tracks this kind of thing, has a one-word description for the pattern. Extractive. The projects pull a lot out of a place and leave little behind. When Brookings looked at the rural communities sitting in the path of the buildout, it found that the sharpest objection was often something other than the electric bill or the water table. People were most afraid of losing control over what their own community becomes.
That last fear is the one worth sitting with, because it points at ownership. A town that hosts one of these campuses has no say over how much water it draws, cannot vote on whether the next phase breaks ground, and never sees a share of what the machines earn once they switch on. The arrangement tilts in a single direction. The meter runs one way.
We have solved a version of this before.
In the 1930s the private power companies looked at rural America and decided not to wire it. The customers were too spread out and the returns too thin, so the lines simply stopped where the profit did. Farmers and small towns answered by pooling their money and building utilities of their own, owned by the people they served and run by boards those people elected. Roughly 900 of those rural electric cooperatives are still operating. Together they serve 42 million Americans across more than half the country’s land, and they reach 92 percent of its persistent-poverty counties.
A cooperative works on a different principle than a company owned by outside investors. There are no outside investors. Whatever surplus it generates belongs to the members, and the board weighs every big decision against one plain question, how it lands on the member’s bill. So when some enormous new customer wants to plug in, a lot of co-ops apply a simple rule. The cost causers are the cost payers. The data center pays for the power it pulls, which keeps the retired couple three roads over from quietly underwriting a server hall on a fixed income.
None of this is a relic. In just the past few years around 200 co-ops have gone into the broadband business, laying fiber out to places the big carriers never bothered with, which is the same instinct that built them in the first place. The model exists to fill the gaps the market walks past.
Current takes that same structure and aims it at the resource this decade is actually fighting over, computing power for AI. We are building it on the same bones as the electric co-ops. The people who use the network own it, each member gets a single vote no matter how much they put in, and the surplus comes back as patronage dividends, the same kind of capital-credits check an electric co-op has mailed its members for generations. How big the network gets, and how fast, is settled by the people who have to live with it.
Walk the town’s complaints back through that structure and they come undone. The bill is no longer a transfer to a shareholder in another state, since the member sitting at home is the owner, and the money that used to leave comes back as a dividend. Decisions about water and land sit with a local board that has to answer to its neighbors, so a facility gets built to the size of the watershed it draws from instead of to the size of a spreadsheet. Residents no longer have to show up at a zoning hearing to beg for a say, because the say is written into the thing they own. And the wealth that AI compute throws off, which lately has been collecting in a very small number of places, flows toward the towns that supply the land, the power, and the demand.
There is a larger argument going on about who should end up owning artificial intelligence, and most of the answers on offer put the stake somewhere large and far away, with a handful of companies or some central institution holding it for everyone and promising to share the proceeds down the road. The cooperative gives a plainer answer. The members own it, and they own it now.
The people fighting these projects are not being unreasonable. They would like to own a piece of what is being built in their backyard. Current is the way they get to.
We already have our first members signed up. If you want computing power that answers to the people who use it, you can join them at [wearethecurrent.net](https://wearethecurrent.net).
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Sources: Axios and Heatmap Pro on Q1 2026 cancellations; Stateline on municipal moratoriums; Spotlight PA on state legislation; WRDW and Fortune on data center water draw; Newsweek on the Bessemer, Alabama project; Consumer Reports (citing Good Jobs First) on extractive siting; Brookings on rural community impact and local control; POWER Magazine and North Dakota Living (citing NRECA) on cooperative structure, scale, large-load programs, and broadband expansion.