OpenAI published on Thursday, November 5, 2026, two documents that define how the company pledges to build its data centers in the United States: the OpenAI Community Compact (National Community Compact) and the Compute Campus Policy Blueprint. The information is confirmed by the company's official publication: future compute campuses that OpenAI owns and operates will pay the full cost of the electricity they use and the infrastructure needed to serve them.
What the OpenAI Community Compact promises
According to OpenAI, each future campus will have its own local compact, shaped with residents, with a local point of contact throughout the life of the project and an annual public report on compliance. The shared commitments include:
- Paying its own way on energy and infrastructure: the company will cover the full cost of the electricity it uses and the infrastructure needed, and will provide financial assurances before major spending, to protect other customers if a project is delayed, reduced or canceled.
- Protecting local resources and reporting on impact: each campus will have a water plan prioritizing closed-loop or low-water cooling, and the company will disclose site-level water and electricity use, as well as publish construction plans and independent noise studies before operations begin and annually afterward.
- Ending NDAs with officials: OpenAI will not require public officials to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition for discussion or negotiation, keeping only narrow protections for legitimate security information, trade secrets or competitively sensitive data.
- Local opportunities: the company will publish the jobs it expects to create, work with unions and training providers to prepare residents, and make sustained investments in priorities chosen with the community.
Local examples: Georgia and Ohio
The examples cited by the company show how this would work in practice. In Effingham County, Georgia, where OpenAI plans a campus, there is an $80 million commitment to community priorities, including a $4.8 million grant to provide free school meals to all 14,000 students in the county and $2 million to develop a local park. In Pike County, Ohio, families identified childcare as a priority, leading to a joint $6 million commitment from OpenAI and SB Energy.
The blueprint for the whole industry
The OpenAI Community Compact comes with the policy blueprint, which goes beyond OpenAI's own campuses and asks federal, state and local lawmakers to create similar rules for the whole industry. Its proposals include large-load tariffs requiring major electricity users to pay the incremental costs they impose on the grid, voluntary demand-flexibility programs with clear rules, faster permitting for generation and transmission, and public terms for tax incentives, with measurable commitments and clawbacks if commitments are not met.
The existing agreement with Georgia Power illustrates the model: the utility can reduce by up to 1,000 megawatts the power delivered to the Effingham campus during periods of high demand. Under Project Camellia, OpenAI contracted 3.2 gigawatts from Georgia Power, delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032.
Context: Stargate, Grid Protectors and the elections
The OpenAI Community Compact builds on commitments announced on January 20, 2026, when OpenAI presented the Stargate community pledges to pay its own energy costs and develop plans shaped by local priorities. They also follow the November 2 launch of the Grid Protectors program, which provides for agreements letting future campuses reduce electricity demand when the grid is under stress.
The announcement comes amid strong public backlash against data center expansion in the United States: according to press reports, American voters backed measures limiting data centers in local ballots in the midterm elections. On social media, the announcement is also fueling debate about the company's change of language, now calling its data centers "compute campuses" — a reading circulating as trend and analysis, not as a fact confirmed by the company. OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, told reporters the blueprint aims to establish "a very high floor" for infrastructure development.
What to watch now
In practice, the test is now twofold: whether OpenAI's project agreements and annual reports will show compliance with the compact at its own campuses, and whether lawmakers will extend similar protections to residents when other developers build.
Read more on Geekiki: OpenAI: AI agents discover 948 vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel
Image credit: aerial image of a data center campus, released by OpenAI (images.openai.com).
Sources:
- OpenAI — Setting a new standard for responsible AI infrastructure
- Unite.AI — OpenAI Publishes Community Compact and AI Campus Policy Blueprint
- Silicon Report — OpenAI pledges to cover power costs for future data centers
- ShiftDelete — OpenAI Community Compact Drops NDAs, Covers Power Bills
Transparency: this article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, cross-checking public posts on X and social media and sources on the internet. We recommend consulting the original sources listed above to confirm the information.
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