I've been making some version of this argument for years, long before AI data centers were the th
ing everyone wanted to build in their backyard. It was never really about data centers. It's about who gets to set the standard in a negotiation, and what happens to a community when it lets someone else set it for them.
That question isn't hypothetical here. There's been a lot of chatter in Amherst County about a proposed data center, and the arguments follow the same script every time: jobs and tax revenue on one side, questions about water, power, and who's actually accountable if the project doesn't play out as promised on the other.
That's the piece worth being intentional about. If a community wants a voice in how a project moves forward, the way to get it is to state clearly and specifically what matters, early, before anything is negotiated, and to leave the emotion out of it. A calm, factual statement of what's required is easier to act on than a room full of frustration. Getting in front of economic development, the city council, or the county board with a clear ask, well before a vote, is what gives residents a real seat at the table.
I've seen this pattern before: in technology deals, vendor contracts, economic development pitches, and now AI infrastructure. An outside party comes in with a proposal that looks good on paper: jobs, tax revenue, investment, prestige. The upside gets negotiated in detail, because everyone at the table wants the deal to happen. The downside gets a sentence, if it gets mentioned at all, because nobody wants to be the one who slows things down by asking what happens if it doesn't work out.
That's how a developer's standard becomes the operative standard. Not through bad faith, necessarily, but through the simple mechanics of who writes the first draft and who's in a hurry to sign it. A developer's standard is built to make the deal easy to close. A community's standard, if anyone actually wrote one down, would be built to make the outcome livable for the next twenty years. Those are different documents, and if only one of them exists, guess which one governs.
Cuban's decommissioning point is really an accountability point wearing a data-center costume. Strip away the specifics of cooling towers and power draw, and the underlying questions are the same ones I've asked in every technology partnership I've walked into as a CIO: Who defines what success looks like? Who verifies it, and how? What happens, specifically, when the commitment isn't met? If a community, a business, or an organization can't answer those three questions before signing, it hasn't negotiated a standard. It's accepted one, and it usually won't recognize the difference until the developer is gone and the bill for cleanup lands on someone who never agreed to pay it.
This shows up everywhere I've worked, not just in infrastructure deals. It shows up in SaaS contracts where the vendor's SLA sounds generous until you read what happens when they miss it. It shows up in technology partnerships where the exit clause was an afterthought because everyone was too excited about the launch to think about the unwind. It shows up in grant-funded initiatives where the granting body's definition of success and the community's definition of success were never actually reconciled, just assumed to be the same thing.
The fix isn't complicated, even if it's uncomfortable. Before you sign anything, write down what you're actually requiring, not what the other party is offering. Require oversight that doesn't report to the party being overseen. Require guarantees backed by an entity that can actually pay them, not a shell built for exactly this deal. Require a plan for what happens when the relationship ends, because every relationship ends eventually, and the terms of that ending should be set while you still have leverage, not after you've lost it.
Optimism is what gets deals signed. It's also what gets communities and businesses exposed, because optimism doesn't like to sit in the same room as "what if this goes wrong." Preparation is what makes sure a good idea doesn't turn into an unrecoverable one.
Before your next partnership, your next vendor contract, your next development deal: ask whose standard you're actually operating under. If the honest answer is "theirs," you haven't finished negotiating yet.