Two days after voters appeared to reject data centers in town after town on Election Day, OpenAI went shopping for something it cannot build on its own: permission.

On Thursday, the company published a National Community Compact, in which it pledged to pay for the electricity and grid infrastructure of the data center campuses it owns and operates. It also committed to posting financial guarantees before major spending begins, so other utility customers aren't left holding the bill if a project is delayed or canceled. OpenAI told Fortune the compact had been months in the making and reflected pledges the company has already made at its data center campuses—the document simply marks the first time OpenAI has put a number of those commitments in writing.

Mining and energy companies have a name for what OpenAI is pursuing: a social license. The concept sits at the heart of Community Partnership Agreements (CPAs), which entail securing a community's ongoing consent to operate. No zoning board grants it, and no tax abatement can buy it. Companies earn it by demonstrating to the people next door that a project leaves them better off—or at least no worse off. Lose it, and permits stall, lawsuits pile up, and local officials find reasons to say no. (The author's graduate capstone examined social license in Peru, an approach that has since been enacted into law.)

Following Tuesday's Democratic wave, the AI industry discovered how little of that license it had left. Notably, the midterm turnout was not a cry from voters to stop the buildout—it was a demand to put a new price tag on it. OpenAI is the first major AI company to agree to pay that price since the votes were counted.

Limits, Not Bans, on Data Centers

Data centers appeared on ballots in roughly 40 localities across the country. By Wednesday morning, about 28 measures had passed in 25 localities, all of them opposing data centers. Chief among them were the 18 municipalities in Ohio, a state that already has 125 data center moratoriums.

In Sunbury, Ohio, voters banned data centers over 25 megawatts, 79% to 21%, after Amazon proposed a $2 billion campus there. In Trenton, Ohio—where Amazon Web Services is already building a 250-megawatt data center—a ban passed 80% to 20%. In Hubbard, Ohio, a ban won 76% to 24%, and the mayor has since said a proposed 300-megawatt project is dead.

But voters were not saying no to data centers outright: the ballot measures placed limits on data centers rather than imposing full bans. In Perry, Ohio, 87% of voters required hyperscale developers seeking tax breaks to post financial guarantees and meet noise limits—the same safeguard OpenAI offered two days later. Grove City, Ohio, banned nothing: by 55% to 45%, it required a public vote on any project exceeding 50 acres, 20 megawatts, or 500,000 gallons of water a day. Most of the measures set a size threshold, meaning a modest server farm can still come to town, but a gigawatt-scale campus cannot.

The pushback was not confined to one party. Former Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy pledged a moratorium on construction until the legislature acted, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott had already paused new grid connections for data centers in August. The common complaint was the electric bill: more than 70% of Americans polled said they would oppose a data center planned near them, with rising power prices the top reason.

Swapping Tax Breaks for Training Programs

Corporations have long benefited from a familiar playbook across local, municipal, state, and federal levels: extract a tax credit in exchange for arriving in a jurisdiction. The examples are endless—taxpayers have spent $33 billion getting sports stadiums built, of which communities rarely see the full amount returned. Perhaps the most famous example of tax incentives proving futile is Amazon's HQ2 saga: Newark, New Jersey, offered $7 billion in tax incentives to host the company's second headquarters, while New York City offered “only” $3 billion. Amazon was always going to pick Queens, but the company shrewdly played more than two dozen jurisdictions across the country against one another to extract the largest tax reward.

The AI buildout has followed the same script. For most of the boom, the industry's offer to communities was simple: we bring tax revenue and construction jobs, you bring the tax breaks. Tuesday's results showed that offer was no longer on the table.

Hyperscalers are now making a new offer—one that looks a lot like a social license agreement. In January, Microsoft launched a “Community-First AI Infrastructure” plan, pledging to pay its own way on electricity, pay full local property taxes without seeking tax breaks, replenish more water than it uses, and offer free AI training in local schools and community colleges. A week later, OpenAI said every Stargate campus would get its own community plan. By this fall, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon had signed a non-binding White House pledge to build or buy the power their facilities need.

That is repricing in action. Instead of asking towns for discounts, the industry now offers to cover the grid upgrades, the water, the training and—in OpenAI's case—a guarantee against walking away. Previously, every one of those costs fell on the community.

Bans do not make demand for computing power disappear; they move it. Harwood, the lone town that voted the industry's way, sits near a data center that Applied Digital is already building. The projects pushed out of Sunbury and Hubbard will look for counties that still say yes—at whatever price those counties set.

While it may seem absurd to think of some newly elected members of the Democratic wave advocating to put “a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out of control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence,” as Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) posted on Election Day on X, it is hardly a stretch to think that voters came out to rethink how the AI buildout is working in their communities—and for them.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.