Lauren Keeler

And that's why we really encourage communities that are interested in hosting data centers to go the extra mile and ask for additional benefits from those data centers.

Such as?

Data centers can do revenue sharing.

So communities could ask for a percentage of the profits to be paid into a fund that goes directly to public works or to education so that as data centers are financially successful, the communities next to them are financially successful as well.

I also think safeguards against environmental pollution, overuse of water resources, the price of energy going up, all of those can be provisions that are built into an agreement with data center operators that protect neighboring communities.

legislation is fragmented, right?

We're not seeing federal legislation.

And so data center operators are really interested in getting up and running.

And so they're going to go to places where it is easier

to get a data center.

And so you are seeing impacts of organized opposition on where data centers are being located.

Data centers right now, we have clusters in areas that have previously hosted them where there's been a need.

So you have a cluster in Virginia that supports the defense industry.

You have a cluster in the Northwest that supports the tech industry, the aerospace industry around Seattle.

Increasingly, we have a cluster here in Arizona that's supporting chip manufacturing.

But yes, the lack of a federal legislation creates geographic fragmentation and puts the burden on communities to advocate for themselves when a data center operator is looking to locate there.

Yeah, I mean, there's a sense of not in my backyard, I think, that is parallel.

One of the things that I think is similar, we've seen in Arizona, for example, a moratorium on solar development in the western part of the state.

And what we heard from communities that lived there was, hey, you're taking out this big swath of desert and you're sending the power to L.A.

and Phoenix.