Rhode Island AI Plans Face Data Center Cost Test

Rhode Island has produced an AI plan, which is what a state produces when it would like to be seen producing something. According to the report, it is "largely a roadmap, setting out recommendations rather than a completed budget or statewide targets for enrollment, job placement and investment returns." Which is a courteous way of saying: no money, no numbers, and no method of telling afterwards whether any of it worked. The ribbon gets cut either way; the ribbon was always going to be the easy part.

The legislation is where the money actually speaks. One bill hands large data centers a thirty-year sales tax exemption — three decades, comfortably longer than most mortgages — in exchange for investing "significantly" in local facilities, labor and renewable energy. "Significantly" is not a figure, which is presumably the point, since a figure would have to be defended in public. The companion bill does require large data centers to pay for their own electrical infrastructure upgrades and to report water usage to the state, a clause you draft the moment you notice that these buildings drink.

So the "cost test" in the headline is really a test of who is doing the counting. The state gets a roadmap; the data centers get thirty years of foregone sales tax and, with luck, a grid that somebody else paid to strengthen. Water usage reporting is at least a receipt, though a receipt is not a cap, in the same way that a recommendation is not a budget. And with no statewide targets for investment returns anywhere in the plan, those returns will be assessed by whoever is loudest at the next press conference. Generous terms, deferred arithmetic, and a photo opportunity — the full set.