Free-Market Coalition’s Data Center Principles Call for Digital Abundance, Protecting Resource and Ratepayers

From e-commerce to cloud computing, artificial intelligence to remote work, the modern world is increasingly digital and dependent on data centers, the physical foundation of the 21^st Century economy. As communities grapple with building out this vital infrastructure, a coalition of organizations dedicated to limited government and protecting the free market has issued a statement of principles to ensure that the United States continues to lead the world on data center infrastructure.

The coalition of the Goldwater Institute, the Abundance Institute, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance—with foundational research input from the James Madison Institute—is urging legislators to enact policies that ensure technological growth is driven by free markets rather than bureaucratic mandates, while preserving individual rights, rewarding private initiative, and protecting ratepayers.

The following seven principles start from a default policy posture of enabling data center infrastructure to grow:

1. Data centers are critical technology infrastructure that support an ecosystem of economic activity. We reject arbitrary bans, emergency moratoria, and discriminatory prohibitions on data center development, which raise costs and harm American technological leadership and national security.
2. Data centers are already essential infrastructure for AI, cloud computing, and the modern world. As demand grows, US firms must be free to expand capacity to host the infrastructure underpinning the next generation of services.
3. Property rights must be respected and the policy environment must be predictable. Data centers should be afforded the same legal certainties as traditional commerce. They should also be classified and treated consistently with comparable industrial or commercial uses, and governed by objective standards rather than retroactive or discriminatory permitting imposed under pressure.
4. Energy abundance and market access to power must be prioritized. AI and the digital economy require the nation’s energy capacity to grow, which is why we support a framework that values energy abundance, empowers consumer choice, protects property rights, and allows market forces to shape the energy landscape.
5. Fiscal integrity must be maintained and general ratepayers must be protected. Data centers should be neither privileged nor punished by the communities that host them. They should operate under rules that ensure their extraordinary new electric load is not shifted to households and existing businesses.
6. Water stewardship must be prioritized through evidence-based permitting. Responsible water use is fully compatible with data center growth. Under existing permitting processes, applicants can be required to demonstrate no harm to the watershed or to neighboring wells before a permit is issued.
7. The right to innovate and to cloud compute must be respected. With the rapid evolution of AI and high-performance computing, policy frameworks should favor experimentation over prohibition and flexibility over static assumptions about how data centers operate today.

Data centers are as important today as previous innovations in telephones, broadband, and power plants were to prior generations. The builders of this modern-day infrastructure deserve the same freedom to respond to market signals to enable broad economic participation and national competitiveness.

The digital future is going to be built somewhere. By sticking to a free-market framework that rewards private initiative and protects individual rights and ratepayers, U.S. leaders can ensure it is built right here.

Click here to read the full Digital Infrastructure Ratepayer and Resource Protection Accord.