OpenAI Pledges No NDAs With Officials and Full Power Costs at Its Data Centre Campuses

The commitments come in two documents: a national "community compact" for campuses that OpenAI owns and operates, and a "compute campus policy blueprint" with recommendations for state and federal policymakers. Bloomberg reported that the company presented the framework as something it believes should be adopted into the laws governing AI's expansion.

The timing matters. Tuesday's US midterm elections handed Democrats control of both houses of Congress, and opposition to large data centres over electricity bills, water use and secrecy around site deals featured in races across the country. OpenAI is trying to show communities and incoming lawmakers that it will accept tighter terms before those terms are imposed on it.

According to an account of the documents published by Unite.AI, the compact sets a national baseline that will be adapted into a local version at each future campus OpenAI owns and runs. On energy, OpenAI says it will pay for its own electricity and for the infrastructure needed to serve its sites, provide financial assurances before major spending so that other utility customers are protected if a project is delayed, scaled back or cancelled, and give utilities realistic forecasts of how much power it needs and when.

The nondisclosure pledge carries exceptions. OpenAI will keep narrow confidentiality protections for security information, trade secrets and competitively sensitive material, the account said. The compact also promises site-level disclosure of water and electricity use, independent noise studies before a campus starts operating and every year after that, a water plan for each campus that favours closed-loop or low-water cooling, local hiring goals where labour markets allow, and annual public reporting.

The policy blueprint goes further than OpenAI's own sites. It asks state utility commissions to create large-load tariffs that require major electricity users to pay the incremental grid costs they cause, with public explanations of how those costs are allocated. It also backs voluntary demand-flexibility programmes, such as cutting load or switching to on-site generation and batteries when the grid is strained, and calls for faster federal permitting of generation and transmission, clearer authority for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to speed up grid connections for ready-to-build projects, and a return of technology-neutral clean electricity tax credits. Where states offer discretionary incentives to data centres, the blueprint says the terms should be public and include clawbacks if companies miss material commitments.

The compact builds on commitments OpenAI has already made at individual sites. In Effingham County, Georgia, where the company is contracting for 3.2 gigawatts delivered in phases from 2028 to 2032, Georgia Power can cut deliveries to the campus by up to 1,000 megawatts during periods of high demand. OpenAI has also pledged $80 million to local priorities there, including $4.8 million to fund free school meals for the county's 14,000 students. In Pike County, Ohio, OpenAI and SB Energy jointly committed $6 million to childcare after residents named it as a priority.

The commitments apply only to campuses OpenAI owns and operates, not to capacity it leases from cloud providers and developers, which accounts for much of its compute. The individual agreements that put the compact into effect still have to be negotiated site by site, so its first real test will be whether OpenAI's project contracts and annual reports match what it has promised.