After the Ballot Rebuke, OpenAI Promises to Pay Full Power Costs and Drop NDAs, and Meta Admits Building Will Get Harder

Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, told a briefing on Wednesday that the aim is to set "a very high floor" for how projects proceed. He said the document had been in preparation since August and that he had met dozens of lawmakers and candidates while drafting it. The timing is hard to miss. OpenAI told investors in February it is aiming at $600 billion of total compute spending by 2030, a figure that depends on communities saying yes. CNBC notes that Meta, Microsoft, Google and Anthropic have also set out comparable commitments.

What did Meta say about data centres after the midterms?

Meta president Dina Powell McCormick spoke at the Wall Street Journal's Tech conference on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported. She said she expects data centres to become harder to build after Democratic gains and that the industry has not explained the benefits of its investments well enough. She linked local opposition to a wider unease about AI itself.

Her prescription was the same menu of promises: pay for its own electricity, steer any resulting tax surpluses to teachers and first responders, hire locally and seek support from both parties. Meta has data centres in 23 states, TechCrunch says, with five projects of a gigawatt or more planned, one of them in Texas. She also said Meta gets calls every day from companies wanting to lease its computing capacity, which is the demand the ballot box is now pushing against.

Will pledges change what voters think?

That is the open question. Promises are cheap until they appear in a contract or a statute, and OpenAI itself is asking lawmakers to make them binding. Utilities, county boards and state legislators will decide whether to treat the blueprints as a baseline or as public relations. For the industry the measure of success will be local: the next planning hearing, and the next vote.