Defending the Right to Compute: Goldwater Fights Missoula, Mont., Tech Firm Restrictions

In 2025, Montana became the first state in the nation to adopt a “Right to Compute Act,” a policy championed by the state’s free-market think tank, the Frontier Institute. As passed, this new law says that whenever the government restricts citizens’ ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, those restrictions must be “demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest.” Mont. Code Ann. § 2-10-204. The statute’s definition of “compelling government interest” expressly allows the government to require certain facilities to develop risk management policies, to prevent or address fraud, to prevent persons from knowingly distributing “deepfakes and other harmful synthetic content,” or to take “actions that prevent or abate common law nuisances created by physical datacenter infrastructure.” Mont. Code Ann. § 2-10-203. But because the use of computational resources implicates both the freedom of speech and users’ property rights, the statute requires the government to bear the burden of proving that any restriction it imposes on the use of computational resources is both “demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored” so that citizens may exercise the maximum degree of freedom that is consistent with any compelling interest the government might be trying to serve.

Joshua Rhines is the CEO of CubCloud AI, an 18-employee company that intends to provide AI computing opportunities to clients. Several of these clients, including fitness centers, insurance companies, and telecommunications companies, are located in the City of Missoula, and CubCloud has invested nearly $2 million to establish a headquarters in the City.  Joshua developed plans to expand the company’s ability to serve clients that complied with Montana’s statutory guidelines for data facilities and that was consistent with the existing zoning for the property on which it would be built. But on October 5, the City Council voted 10-2 to change its ordinances in such a way that CubCloud’s plans for growth would no longer be permitted anywhere in the City—and even if CubCloud was allowed to develop new computational resources, the new ordinance would not allow the company to make them available to clients.

This new ordinance directly restricts Mr. Rhines’s ability to own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes—precisely what the Right to Compute Act was designed to protect.

The Goldwater Institute has partnered with the Frontier Institute to establish the Big Sky Legal Project, whose goal is to pursue litigation that advances the cause of free markets and individual liberty.  This will be the Big Sky Legal Project’s first case. The goal of this case is to ensure that all Montanans get to enjoy the freedom of expression and property rights that are protected by the Right to Compute Act. A victory here will not only vindicate the principles of the Right to Compute Act, it will also ensure that this statute can serve as an example to other states that wish to protect the free speech and property rights of their own citizens.