Op-Ed

President Donald Trump has been adamant about one thing: the United States is in an existential race against the People’s Republic of China to win the biggest prize of all: AI dominance. President Trump has also weighed in on the side of data centers to meet the demand provided by accelerated AI adoption. Microsoft recently reported a $680 billion backlog in demand for its cloud services—an 84 percent increase over the previous year.

Former artificial intelligence researcher Jacob Coxon recently told the world that the companies he once worked for are driving humanity to the brink of extinction. Days after he made his claims, tech CEOs seemed to agree, and in a series of lengthy manifestos and X posts, asked for … an antitrust exemption.

We are facing the multi-trillion-dollar march of private artificial intelligence (AI) data centers into our economy, politics, ecosystem, and cultural life. Amid calls for blanket moratoria and investments in data centers in space, how can the public assert a controlling interest in the development and outcomes of this technology? This essay proposes developing municipally owned, small-scale data center capacity to support municipal services and public-interest AI.

Washington has a familiar playbook when an outdated federal program runs into trouble: Rather than fixing what’s broken, it just finds someone new to pay for it. That is the danger Congress faces today with the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund. For nearly three decades, USF has helped connect rural communities, low-income Americans, schools, libraries, and rural healthcare providers.

Today, public universities, public libraries, public hospitals, national research laboratories, public schools, and local governments fulfill public obligations to manage critical data resources using digital infrastructure they do not own and, in many cases, cannot build or maintain themselves. Governments allocate resources to these institutions so they can provide services we consider essential, and for many, this government support drives specific obligations to their publics.

When the Wright brothers laid down 60 feet of wooden track in the North Carolina sand dunes and launched America into the age of flight, they could not have imagined the broader possibilities for human ingenuity and thriving that their innovation would unlock.

If the character Edward Cullen of the ubiquitous Twilight saga taught us anything (aside from the fact that Robert Pattinson’s hair can do no wrong), it is that being a heretic can be cool. In the series, the Volturi—the Vampiric Council—operates as an authoritative government dictating the terms of vampire life: encouraging slaughter of humans, forbidding certain romance, and eventually seeking the destruction of Edward and Bella’s baby. Cullen went against these vampire norms to protect his loved ones, doing so in a way that made many hearts flutter.

A recurrent theme from US cellular industry commentary in recent years has been complaints about supposedly unused or underused spectrum that could be put to "better" use. Yet there is surprisingly little focus on the major carriers' own fallow and underused spectrum assets, which deserve similar scrutiny. We have heard repeated claims that Citizens Broadband Radio Service spectrum is not used sufficiently or that dynamic sharing mechanisms are allegedly inefficient. The benefits of technology innovation and new deployment models are downplayed.

It used to be a real challenge to talk to someone across Alaska, or across the country. Many Alaskans remember waiting in line to use the only telephone in a village. For me, it was the phone at the winter watchman's house in Ekuk. We each got a few minutes because everyone was waiting. Long-distance calls were expensive, and simply talking to family or conducting business required patience and persistence. Even after the internet arrived, connectivity remained limited in many parts of Alaska.

Recently released records show that the Biden administration’s heavy fiber focus for broadband deployment was extraordinarily costly to taxpayers. Obtained by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S.