Every Alaskan Gets a Check. Every Virginian Gets a Power Bill.

By Will Melton · July 19, 2026 · 11 min read read

Category: Opinion

Tags: Sovereign Wealth Fund, AI Economy, Affordability, General Assembly, Data Story, Energy, Data Centers, Alaska Permanent Fund, Virginia Permanent Fund

Virginia is the data center capital of the world, and the boom is now pouring into Richmond's backyard. Alaska solved this problem 50 years ago with a permanent fund and a dividend. It's time Virginia acted like an owner.

I've been to Alaska twice, and both times it changed how I think about what a place owes its people.

If you've never been, it's hard to convey. You fly into Anchorage and the mountains come down to meet the water like they own it. The people are great. Kind, hard working, outdoorsy folks. Both times I flew out to Katmai, where brown bears fish the falls and the silence is so complete you can hear your own pulse. It is one of the most beautiful, peaceful, unspoiled places in America, and most Americans never get to see it. The people who live there know exactly what they have.

The scenery is what struck me most. But the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that matters for Virginia, is something else entirely. When you talk to locals about the Permanent Fund — the state fund that has paid every Alaskan resident an annual dividend since 1982 — nobody bats an eye. It's just part of life. A check arrives every fall, for every adult and every child, drawn from the invested earnings of the state's oil wealth. Ask Alaskans why, and the answer is a kind of common sense that has gone missing everywhere else: this place is extraordinary, industry profits from it, and the people who live here are owed a share of that. The fund is also something subtler. It's a check on industry. When extraction thrives, every Alaskan sees real upside. When industry wants something from the state, it negotiates with a public that has a genuine stake. That arrangement has held for fifty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. It was a Republican governor, Jay Hammond, who built it.

Virginia needs to have this conversation. Right now.

The pattern is old

There is a recurring pattern in American history: the productive economy leaps forward, and the monetary and institutional systems built for the old economy can't keep up. The gap between what the economy produces and how its gains flow to people widens until something breaks, and then we build new institutions.

Richmond knows this story in its bones. During the Civil War, this city lived through one of the worst inflations in American history. Prices in the Confederacy rose by thousands of percent; by 1863, Richmond families were rioting for bread on Cary Street while the war economy roared. The productive capacity of a society and the wellbeing of its people had come completely unglued from each other. That was war-driven, yes. But we know what these dislocations look like from the inside, because they happened here.

The Gilded Age ran the pattern again in slow motion. Railroads, steel, and oil created wealth on a scale the country had never seen, concentrated in the hands of a few titans, while the banking system lurched from panic to panic — 1873, 1893, and finally 1907, when the system was saved only because J.P. Morgan personally locked the nation's bankers in his library. It took that humiliation for America to admit its monetary architecture no longer fit its economy. The Federal Reserve was born in 1913. The Factory Acts, the labor movement, the forty-hour week, Social Security — every one of these was an institution invented because the old arrangements couldn't carry the new economy.

Each time, the pattern is the same: the technology arrives decades before the institutions that make it livable. The only question is how long we let the gap grow, and who gets crushed in it.

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The gap is open again, and Virginia is standing in the middle of it

Virginia is the data center capital of the world. Roughly 35 percent of the world's hyperscale data market sits in this Commonwealth — the highest concentration on Earth — and most of it is packed into Northern Virginia, which alone hosts about 13 percent of global capacity and a quarter of America's. Over 70 percent of the world's internet traffic touches this state. My Channel RVA colleague Courtney Turrin has written about what that concentration means for national security. I want to talk about what it means for household budgets. The AI boom runs through Virginia the way oil runs through Alaska. This is our North Slope.

And here's what Richmond needs to understand: the current data center capital is full, and the overflow is coming here. With Northern Virginia near capacity, analysts now rank the Richmond region among the fastest-growing data center markets in the nation. Google's $9 billion Virginia expansion includes its first Richmond-area data center in Chesterfield's Meadowville Technology Park, with two more county sites planned. Powhatan approved a $2.7 billion campus. Henrico already hosts more than ten facilities with more in the pipeline. Central Virginia is about to live through everything Loudoun County already did — the buildout, the transmission lines, the rate pressure — and we are deciding the terms right now, mostly without realizing it. Henrico County government itself just asked its own employees to cut power usage as electricity rates jumped 25 percent. When the county can't afford its own power bill, the residents certainly can't.

The strain is already visible statewide. Power bills are rising, and residents across the Commonwealth increasingly blame data center demand. Housing prices keep climbing. Food and fuel cost more. And while our taxes aren't going up, there's no relief to speak of, either. The industry thrives; the household budget tightens. At the very same time, AI — the technology these buildings exist to serve — is beginning to reshape the labor market itself. Companies have shifted to a low-hire, low-fire posture. Entry-level white-collar hiring has contracted sharply. The people most exposed to that shift are the same people watching their utility bills climb to power the machines replacing them. If that isn't the productive economy outrunning the systems meant to serve people, I don't know what is.

To their credit, states are starting to act. This summer, Virginia became the first state in the nation to impose a tax on data center electricity consumption — $0.011 per kilowatt-hour, projected to raise $600 million a year. Days ago, New York became the first state to impose a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, pausing permits for a year while it writes rules to protect ratepayers and the grid.

So the two poles of the national debate are now on the table: tax them, or stop them. Virginia chose the first. New York chose the second. I want to argue for a third path that neither state has taken, one that Alaska charted fifty years ago.

The problem with the incremental path

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Look closely at what Virginia's new tax actually does. The $600 million flows into the general fund and gets spent — this year, on this budget. Anything collected above the cap gets refunded to the data center operators. Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas herself warned colleagues against using one-time money for ongoing expenses, and she's right. But the current structure guarantees exactly that: we consume the revenue annually, we build recurring obligations on top of it, and we bank nothing.

Play the incremental path forward. The data centers keep coming, because the AI buildout demands it and Virginia's fiber, power corridors, and proximity to Washington make us irreplaceable — for now. Each year the legislature fights over the same pie. Each year the affordability squeeze deepens, because none of the revenue reaches households directly. Public resentment grows — polls already show three-quarters of Virginia voters blaming data centers for their utility bills. Eventually the politics snap, and we lurch toward the New York solution: shut it down. The industry decamps to Ohio or Texas, and Virginia is left with the transmission lines, the drained aquifers, and a hole in the budget where the tax revenue used to be. Depreciating buildings, no endowment. That's how resource states die. Ask West Virginia, which created a Future Fund in 2014 and let it sit empty for nine years until it was quietly killed.

The moratorium path and the tax-and-spend path share the same flaw: neither one builds anything permanent for Virginians.

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What the alternative looks like

Now imagine Virginia had done what Alaska did.

A Virginia Permanent Fund. A fixed share of data center revenue — the consumption tax, a portion of any restructured sales-tax arrangement, future compute-linked revenue — deposited by law into an invested endowment that the legislature cannot raid for operating expenses. Alaska put its rule in the state constitution; that discipline is the entire reason its fund survived while West Virginia's starved. The principal is never spent. The earnings are.

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And the earnings go to two things.

First: rebuild the unemployment system for the AI transition. Our unemployment insurance was designed for a world where a laid-off worker found a similar job in a few weeks. The displacement now underway is different in kind — careers ending, not pausing, and transitions taking a year or more of retraining. Fund earnings could extend benefit duration for workers displaced by automation, pay for retraining and apprenticeships in the trades and care work that AI can't touch, and offer wage insurance that tops up pay when someone takes a lower-paying job to reenter the workforce. Virginia would become the first state whose safety net was actually built for the economy the data centers are creating.

Second: a dividend to Virginians. They deserve it, and Alaskans could tell you why. Every household in this Commonwealth is paying for the AI boom already — through their power bill, their rent, their grocery bill, the transmission towers going up over farmland their families have worked for generations. A dividend flips that. When the industry thrives, every Virginian sees upside, in a check with their name on it. Alaska has distributed more than $25 billion to its residents since 1982, and researchers credit the dividend with helping give Alaska some of the highest economic equality of any state. It's the closest thing to a working basic income in America, built by a Republican governor and defended by five decades of voters across every party, because everyone owns it.

There's a design lesson in the fine print, too: the Supreme Court struck down Alaska's original formula, which paid longtime residents more, so the dividend must be flat and equal — every Virginian, the same share.

One thing gets lost in the objections: a fund like this is good for the industry, too. Data centers want to be here. What they need is durable social license — a public that has a reason to say yes. Henrico County has already run the small-scale experiment: it channeled data center tax revenue into a $60 million affordable housing trust fund that has helped finance hundreds of affordable units in two years. That's a county proving the principle that this revenue can visibly, tangibly improve residents' lives. Now scale the principle, and add the one thing Henrico's model lacks — permanence. A trust fund spends the money once. An endowment pays forever.

The window is open now

This isn't a someday idea. The General Assembly just created a Joint Subcommittee on Tax Policy specifically to study data centers, and a work group is due to report in November on restructuring the industry's tax treatment. The mechanism exists. The revenue exists. The study process is literally underway. What's missing is the ambition to think in fifty-year terms instead of two-year budget cycles.

I know this is a contentious fight. The industry will say a permanent fund locks in taxation and scares off investment; ratepayer advocates will say a dividend is a distraction from lowering bills directly; budget hawks will want the money for schools and roads today. Those are real arguments and they deserve a real, honest debate — the kind we've mostly avoided by treating each budget season as its own emergency. But the choice in front of us is not between the status quo and risk. The status quo is the risk. Incrementalism ends with Virginia as a depleted resource colony; prohibition ends with the industry, and its revenue, somewhere else.

Alaska found the third way: welcome the industry, take a permanent stake, and pay the people. Fifty years on, no serious person there would undo it. Stand at Brooks Falls watching the bears fish and you understand something about that state — the people decided their home was too valuable to give away, so they priced it, banked it, and shared it.

Virginia's resource isn't oil. It's position, power, and fiber — the ground the intelligence economy is being built on. That ground belongs to eight and a half million of us. It's time we acted like owners.

Will Melton is the founder and CEO of Xponent21, founder of AI Ready RVA, and publisher of Channel RVA.