A top official on the White House’s AI and Super Intelligence Task Force is urging the data center industry to abandon a playbook that has increasingly put it at odds with the communities hosting its sprawling facilities. Scott Kupor, who serves as vice chair of the task force, said builders should commit up front to absorbing the water and electricity cost increases their projects create — and stop negotiating with local governments behind nondisclosure agreements.
Kupor made the comments Wednesday during an interview on the Fox Business Network, according to clips flagged by Breitbart News. His remarks come as data center construction surges across the country, driven by the power demands of artificial intelligence, and as local officials in several states face mounting voter anger over rising utility bills and strained water supplies.
NDAs called the ‘totally wrong way’
At the center of Kupor’s critique is the practice of using confidentiality agreements during negotiations with host communities. He described that approach as counterproductive and said the industry’s instinct to litigate the question of whether water and power prices will rise only deepens distrust.
“I just think that’s the totally wrong way to do it,” Kupor said, describing the dynamics he said he sees reflected in polling of affected areas. He argued that residents are less interested in dueling studies than in whether their bills will go up and whether anyone will address the disruption that comes with a major construction project.
“I don’t think going in with NDAs does anybody any good,” he added, saying that debating water and electricity costs in the abstract is a losing strategy because “nobody’s going to take the time to read the studies.”
Instead, Kupor pointed to what he characterized as a straightforward bargain: data center providers bring their own energy generation and offer what amount to rate guarantees for the communities where they build.
“We get your concerns, we recognize the anxiety, we will deal with the water prices, we will deal with the electricity prices,” he said, describing how he believes the industry should open conversations with local residents. He framed the commitments as “essentially think of it as rate guarantees on behalf of the data center providers, bringing their own energy.”
A workforce pitch to sweeten the deal
Kupor also floated a second concession that he said would be well received: partnerships with local community colleges to train residents for the permanent jobs that data centers create after construction crews leave.
He noted that the building phase brings electricians and plumbers into a community temporarily, but the long-term operation of a data center depends on a different set of workers — network administrators and database administrators who keep the servers running.
Working with community colleges to build that pipeline, he argued, would give host towns a stake in the facilities beyond the tax revenue and would answer a common complaint that data centers create few lasting local jobs.
“I think this is solvable if the industry actually takes a smarter approach to how they’re doing it,” Kupor said.
Political backdrop of rising utility costs
Kupor’s intervention lands as the AI buildout has become an unexpectedly potent political issue at the state and local level. Electricity demand from data centers has pushed utilities in several regions to revise load forecasts upward, and regulators have begun weighing who should pay for new transmission lines and generating capacity — the hyperscalers that need the power, or the residential ratepayers who share the same grid.
Those fights have played out in rate cases and local zoning hearings, where residents have raised concerns about water consumption for cooling, noise from backup generators, and the strain that large loads place on aging infrastructure. In some jurisdictions, officials have complained that confidentiality agreements signed during early negotiations prevented them from fully explaining project terms to the public — a dynamic Kupor appeared to acknowledge in his remarks.
His proposed remedy — voluntary rate guarantees paired with workforce commitments — represents a notable shift in tone from an administration official toward an industry that has otherwise enjoyed broad federal support. The White House has made accelerating AI infrastructure a priority, but the political cost of the buildout has begun to surface in communities that feel they are bearing the burden without sharing the benefit.
Whether data center developers heed the advice is another matter. Companies have often treated siting negotiations as competitive and have resisted commitments that could set precedents across dozens of projects. Kupor’s argument appears aimed at that calculation: that the reputational and political risk of secrecy now outweighs whatever advantage it provides at the bargaining table.
Kupor’s task force role places him at the center of the administration’s efforts to coordinate policy around advanced AI systems and the physical infrastructure they require. His comments suggest that at least part of the federal strategy involves convincing the private sector that community buy-in is a prerequisite for the scale of construction the industry says it needs.
The Fox Business interview also reflects the degree to which the data center debate has migrated from technical journals and utility commission dockets into general-interest television segments — a sign that the issue has become a mainstream political concern rather than a narrow regulatory matter.
For now, Kupor’s message to the industry is essentially that the era of quiet deals is over. “At the end of the day, these things can be solved by rate guarantees or, obviously, bring your own type opportunities for the data center providers,” he said — a formulation that puts the onus on developers to make the first move.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2026/10/15/white-house-ai-si-task-force-vice-chair-data-center-ndas-dont-help-they-should-agree-to-cover-water-power-costs/