What arrives
Firms that no longer need the public. Today the largest AI builders depend on grid connections, building permits, water, public data, public research, spectrum, and land. As they build their own power plants, buy their own land, generate their own data, and hire their own researchers, each of those dependencies becomes something they can route around. The condition that could have been attached to a permit has nothing left to attach to.
What must exist first
The public share, attached as the price of public inputs.
- Equity stakes and levies on automation rents, taken where firms still need public permission.
- Leases, never sales. Grid capacity, spectrum, public data, and public land leased on terms that carry the share, never given away for good.
- Natural resources counted as public inputs. Water, minerals, and soil drawn down pay a share.
- Market access as a second lever. The right to sell in a country carries a share, which lasts after the physical inputs have been internalized (the global loop).
- Leverage tracked as a trend. A published measure of how much leverage remains (leverage half-life).
Why it is cheaper first
Leverage that is not used before it fades is simply lost. A condition on a grid connection costs nothing to write while the firm is asking for the connection. Once the firm has its own power, the same share has to be won through taxation against the full weight of its lobbying, and permanent alienation of a public input cannot be undone at all. That is why it sits in the irreversibility register.
Readiness states
| State | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Started | a share or condition attached to the first large data-center permits or grid connections |
| In place | the share collected routinely on public inputs; no public input sold outright |
| Tested | a firm that built its own power still paying through market access; the share funding a rising floor credit |
What to start now
Some places have already begun, attaching water and grid-cost conditions to new data centers. The next step is to make the condition a share of returns, not only a cost recovery, and to write every public-input agreement as a renewable lease.
Where it is worked out
- Writing circulation into the rules: rule 1, the public share, and rule 11, public inputs that cannot be given away
- Starting now: who can begin it
- The closed loop: why the need for the public is fading