Can Tech Philanthropy Solve What Tech Extraction Creates?

Curious Things Are Happening in Texas

Here’s a curious situation. Companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in data center construction across Texas. At the same time, a wave of political opposition is rising to meet them, and not from whom you’d expect. The resistance is from working families in conservative counties who voted for Trump. They are showing up at town halls, advocating for artificial intelligence (AI) data center moratoriums, and turning down deals that promise waves of economic growth. Some will say these communities don’t understand what’s good for them. That they are being parochial and resistant to “progress.”

Or maybe they understand the deal perfectly well and conclude it’s a stacked one. Soon, the rest of us will have our own math to do. The tech industry is preparing to send as much as $100 billion a year into philanthropy, its self-described “third wave” of giving. Is it giving or to distract from the harm that’s already happening?

Here, we look at what Texas can tell us before that money arrives.

The Technology Sequence We Keep Repeating

When a new technology creates massive wealth, there’s a predictable sequence: first, heaps of enthusiasm about what it will enable and solve; then, the wealth-creation phase—which shifts costs elsewhere; finally, the philanthropic phase, where some of that wealth cycles back, dressed as altruism.

By the time people are asking hard questions about water tables and electric bills, the story about visionary philanthropists has already been established in the cultural milieu.

Many of us have lived through a natural case study of this. In 2012, Facebook went public at a valuation north of $104 billion dollars. The narrative around that IPO was relentlessly optimistic. A new generation of internet wealth was about to flood into philanthropy. Founders would build new foundations, give pledges, and fund cures. And they have, kind of. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) now manages billions of dollars. It’s also important to note that the CZI has radically shifted both its focus and approach to grantmaking. Once a premier K–12 funder, it has pulled funding from previous K–12 commitments, climate change, and social justice, and now devotes much of its work to technology and biomedical research driven by generative AI.

Meanwhile, the social platforms that built unprecedented wealth left their own bill of cascading psychosocial effects. American teenagers report the highest rates of loneliness in measurable history. Political polarization has reached a level last seen before the Civil War. Attention itself—the most basic precondition for democratic citizenship—has been engineered for first-to-market capture and resale.

Now watch the sequence start again, faster this time, with AI. As OpenAI, Anthropic, and the people who built them prepare to release up to $100 billion dollars per year in new philanthropic capital, a familiar chorus has assembled to describe what is needed to absorb this so-called “third wave” of philanthropic generosity.

The first wave of American philanthropy, as the story goes, built brick-and-mortar libraries and the modern foundation à la the Rockefeller donor types. The second ushered in cost-efficacy measurement, which asked donors to justify a gift in terms of measurable outcomes per dollar rather than values-alignment alone. The third, we are told, will require a “Silicon Valley of public goods.” This era will bring new institutions, new talent, and new ways of supercharging the impact of the nonprofit sector.

The timing of this messaging is worth noting. The “third wave” narrative emerges just as these companies are in the wealth-creation phase—as they’re building data centers and extracting resources. The “Magnificent Seven” stocks (Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla) comprise nearly one-third of the S&P 500’s value—specifically 32.7 percent as of mid-June 2026. Their combined market cap was $22 trillion as of June 2026, with each company worth more than $1 trillion. The shorthand is that the economy’s continued growth is heavily tethered to and dependent on sustained enthusiasm for this technology.

Wealthy founders want to establish a moral framework for their accumulation of resources and political influence before it becomes politically visible. By the time people are asking hard questions about water tables and electric bills, the story about visionary philanthropists has already been established in the cultural milieu.

Or has it?

The Not So Magical Economics Behind AI

According to a Texas Tribune analysis, at least 248 data center projects are planned across Texas, with nearly half sited in unincorporated areas where county officials have almost no authority to regulate. These aren’t small facilities. OpenAI’s Stargate facility, now under construction in Milam County, is one of dozens of data centers expected to draw electricity from a Texas grid that is already, by its own operator’s admission, struggling to meet a growing demand.

When a data center connects to a grid, it doesn’t just add demand. It restructures the cost.

So, how is this economically feasible and profitable? When a data center connects to a grid, it doesn’t just add demand. It restructures the cost. Building new transmission lines and generation capacity is very expensive. Those costs get distributed across all users. But the data center pays a negotiated rate. The result is that residential customers—who use less reliable power and have less negotiating power—end up subsidizing the infrastructure that makes the data center’s operations cheaper. This is not a bug in the system. It is quite literally how the system is designed and how it yields enormous profits.

Data centers are a microcosm of a larger reality: an economy that only works because it does not follow true cost accounting. The planetary bill—largely to poor people and the environmental commons—gets externalized, postponed, and erased from view. This approach is not new; it is the signature move of industrial capitalism, but AI inherits this logic with unprecedented intensity.

The machinery accelerates past the capacity of regulatory bodies to anticipate it. It outpaces public deliberation and it outpaces ecological recovery as well as our collective ability to respond.

What About Trickle-down Philanthropy?

In 1910, the wealthiest 0.00001 percent of American households owned wealth equivalent to four percent of national income. Today, according to research compiled by historian Rutger Bregman, that figure is 12 percent.

This is the moment people point back to the nonprofit sector and the promise of trickle-down philanthropy. For example, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, is genuinely committed to philanthropic giving. His 80 percent pledge appears sincere. The question isn’t whether he’s lying about his intentions. But can good intentions function properly when embedded in a system in which the wealth-creation phase (extraction) necessarily harms the communities where the repair phase (philanthropic giving) will eventually operate?

Look at the geography, and the pattern gets uncomfortable fast. Many of the data centers are being built in rural areas like Texas—in unincorporated areas, where communities have the least political power to resist. The generated wealth, however, will be distributed through foundations headquartered in San Francisco and New York. And here we loop back to a familiar nonprofit problem, which is one of social distance. That is, the people making decisions about capital deployment are geographically and institutionally separated from the people bearing the costs of that deployment. They do not feel the consequences of their decision-making.

In a 2026 Center for Effective Philanthropy report on the sector, 93 percent of foundation leaders believe their efforts have been effective while only 54 percent of nonprofit leaders agree. That gap is the crevice between funder and mission, and we’ve mostly learned to live with it. But we can still think upstream, about the externalities everywhere that communities will absorb to make this progress possible. This is not an anti-tech argument. It’s a request that we look squarely at the trade-offs that the system is built to obscure.

Texas and a New Progress Narrative

What’s striking about the data center resistance is who’s leading it. It’s not coming primarily from environmental activists or progressive organizers. It’s coming from residents and county officials in Hood County, near Granbury, who spent the better part of a year fighting eight separate proposed facilities, which would be 51.2 times larger than the Dallas Cowboys stadium. A billboard along the highway clearly conveys it: Don’t data center my Hood County.

According to Gallup, 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. This is not a fringe or outlier position but a growing consensus.

As a native Texan, I can assure you that these are not people known for their anti-capitalist sentiment. They’re economically conservative. But they understand something important: this particular form of economic growth redistributes wealth upward. They’re not against capitalism. They’re against getting a raw deal.

In May, Hill County became the first Texas county to approve a one-year moratorium on data center construction in unincorporated areas, passing it on a 3-2 vote. Within weeks, the developer, RCM Hill LLC, filed a federal lawsuit arguing the moratorium was illegal and unconstitutional, seeking at least $100 million in damages over delays to its 1,235 megawatt data center project, and the county backed down almost immediately. Facing the lawsuit and doubts about its own legal standing, the Commissioners Court voted unanimously to rescind the moratorium just two weeks after passing it, replacing it with a Data Center Development Checklist requiring developers to disclose infrastructure, traffic, water, and resource impacts. The legal fight itself was quietly dismissed by July 9, after lasting just 43 days.

That legal reality is the reason Hood County (an hour northwest) matters more than Hill County does. The opposition there is the most sustained organizing effort in the state: residents built an information network in just weeks, with neighbors going door to door to warn people about the industrial buildings and the electricity and water demands nobody could quantify. More than 160 people filled a ballroom for a town hall, and a candidate who describes himself as “a solid no” on data centers is now running unopposed for county judge. And it has changed almost nothing about what actually gets approved.

Commissioners declined a proposed one-year moratorium in February. They gave conditional approval to the 2,100-acre Comanche Circle data center project in January, then approved the same project without conditions in June after the developer threatened to sue. The county attorney was unusually candid about why: many residents want to stop the industry from moving in, but commissioners are only following the law to avoid legal action, saying there’s a sense that they can’t keep fighting every battle.

A few things become clear watching this play out. The opposition to data centers is real, bipartisan, strategically organized, and growing. What’s missing isn’t public will and collective action but legal standing. Until the state changes what counties are allowed to do, public pressure and litigation risk will keep pulling in opposite directions– and litigation risk will keep winning.

This really isn’t a story about governance mechanisms, though. When local communities begin refusing deals that promise growth, they’re following the math more closely than the people proposing the deals. This extends beyond Texas. According to Gallup, 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. This is not a fringe or outlier position but a growing consensus.

What Does This Mean for Philanthropy and Nonprofits?

The question worth sitting with is not how to leverage “the third wave” for your nonprofit. It’s further upstream than that, and harder: can a system actually repair anything when it’s not bearing the costs of that accumulation? The growing pushback on data centers in Texas suggests that communities are beginning to answer that question: no, it cannot.

Nonprofit professionals are, structurally, the people positioned to see both ends of this at once: the wealth being generated and the communities absorbing the externalities. That’s not a comfortable position, but it’s an important one, and I don’t think we get to look away from it just because a big check might eventually land in our own budget. If we’re doing our jobs, we’re the ones tracking this. Watching how it moves through our own communities, our own families, and the people we’ve committed to serving. Not because tracking it will stop the extraction. But because a sector that can’t see clearly can’t advocate clearly either; and right now, clarity is in short supply.

Back to tech philanthropists. Some sincerely believe they are doing the work of repair with their “third wave” of giving. Sincerity doesn’t change the truism underneath it: the person who broke the system—and never felt the break—cannot be the steward of its recovery. Not for lack of resources but because their interests are structurally misaligned with the communities they harmed.

Instead, the communities themselves are cohering and becoming vocal stewards. They remind us that when well-being gets treated as seriously as financial profit, what once looked impossible starts to look possible again. From here, systems get reimagined and redesigned.

Maybe that’s the third wave actually worth watching for.