GMJoe™ Consulting | Strategic Intelligence
The economic possibilities North Dakota commits to someone else may matter more than the data centers it attracts.
GMJoe™ Strategic Intelligence | November 12, 2026
The most consequential economic decision North Dakota makes about artificial intelligence may concern an industry that does not yet exist.
Data centers are arriving with a familiar proposition: capital investment, construction employment, electricity purchases, and participation in a rapidly expanding technological economy. The visible transaction is straightforward. An enterprise purchases access to infrastructure in exchange for commercial development.
But there may be another transaction occurring beneath the first, one that neither party has fully priced.
Every substantial commitment of electrical capacity potentially reduces the flexibility available to accommodate something else. That something might be advanced manufacturing, agricultural processing, defense production, a future energy technology, or an industrial category that has not yet acquired a name. Its absence from today’s negotiations does not eliminate its future economic value.
This is where GMJoe™ Consulting advances a more speculative proposition: North Dakota may be approaching an era in which its most valuable economic resource is not electricity itself, but the optionality embedded in electricity that has not yet been committed.
An option derives value from the freedom to make a decision later, when additional information becomes available. Once surrendered, that freedom can become extraordinarily expensive to recover.
Consider what happens if artificial intelligence infrastructure undergoes a fundamental technological transformation. Advances in computational efficiency, alternative architectures, distributed processing, or entirely different computing paradigms could eventually alter where enormous concentrations of electricity are economically necessary. A location selected for one generation of computing technology might become less attractive to the next.
Yet transmission investments, capacity reservations, and regional industrial commitments may endure long after the computational assumptions that justified them have changed.
The more intriguing possibility is that developers themselves could eventually recognize this distinction and begin treating assured access to electrical capacity as an independently valuable financial asset.
Under that hypothetical future, the central commercial prize would not necessarily be the data center. It could be the contractual right to command scarce energy infrastructure, a right that might be transferred, financed, or monetized as electricity availability becomes increasingly strategic.
North Dakota could then discover that it has become something considerably more consequential than a host for artificial intelligence.
It could become an upstream supplier of industrial optionality.
That distinction changes the economic calculation. The appropriate market transaction would need to recognize not merely the cost of constructing infrastructure, but the opportunity cost of reserving it, the duration of the commitment, the consequences of technological obsolescence, and the conditions under which unused capacity returns to productive availability.
None of this requires government to predict the winning technology, select favored industries, or substitute administrative judgment for market competition. Quite the opposite. Transparent pricing, contractual discipline, and enforceable private obligations could preserve the capacity of future entrepreneurs to compete for resources that today’s economic actors cannot yet imagine using.
North Dakota’s permanent trusts demonstrate the enduring value of recognizing economic claims before their underlying resources are exhausted. The next generation of wealth creation may require recognizing a different kind of claim before infrastructure commitments become irreversible.
And here lies the most provocative GMJoe™ Consulting conjecture.
The greatest economic loss from an artificial intelligence development strategy might never appear in a financial statement, employment report, or government budget.
It could be an industrial enterprise that never considers North Dakota because the infrastructure it would have needed was committed years earlier.
No announcement would record its departure.
No economic development agency would count the jobs.
No legislative committee would investigate an investment proposal that was never submitted.
The state might celebrate every data center it attracted without ever discovering the more valuable industry that never arrived.
Joe Cozart, GMJoe™, GMJoe™ Consulting
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