In 1862 the scarce resource was land, and Abraham Lincoln gave it to colleges. Today the scarce resource is compute, and our universities are getting priced out of the frontier.
The Situation
Frontier research now runs on compute, and universities can’t afford it. Studying how AI systems behave, fail, and interact in the world takes clusters that cost billions. Not even Harvard can buy a seat at that table.
Case in point, Harvard, with an endowment of nearly $68 billion, is weighing about $25 million for a shared GPU cluster. That would roughly double its AI computing capacity, but it’s less than 0.04% of the endowment and a fraction of a single frontier training run. If Harvard can’t keep up, no university can.
So the most important research of the decade is happening almost entirely inside a handful of private labs. That’s a problem for science, which needs independent checks. And it’s a problem for students, who learn the frontier by working on it.
We’ve solved this kind of problem before. The Morrill Act of 1862 gave each state 30,000 acres of federal land per member of Congress. States sold or used it to found colleges that taught agriculture, engineering, and practical science to ordinary Americans. Cornell, MIT, Penn State, Purdue, and the University of California all trace roots to it.
It may be the best bet on public knowledge this country ever made.
The Idea
A 21st Century Digital Land Grant. Instead of acres, we grant compute. Here’s the sketch:
Who gives: any data center above a size threshold, say 100 MW, so small operators are untouched.
What they give: 10% of capacity, delivered as real GPU hours on their own hardware. No cash buyouts that let the frontier stay private.
Who gets it: R1 and R2 research universities, which means public flagships and regional schools, not just the Ivies.
How it’s shared: a neutral clearinghouse like the National Science Foundation’s existing AI research resource, scaled up to allocate hours by peer review.
What it buys: open research on safety, alignment, science, and medicine, published in public.
The beauty is that nothing new gets built. The capacity is already coming online. We’re just reserving a public lane on the highway.
Why the builders might say yes
Morrill gave away public land, but this asks something of private builders.
Then again, data centers aren’t purely private. They run on public power grids, public water, public land, and public tax breaks. Towns are starting to push back on all four. A share-back to the public is the price of a social license to build.
Yes, it’s effectively a tax on the hyperscalers. But it’s a tax that pays for the research, talent pipeline, and independent scrutiny the frontier needs anyway. Today’s grad student on a granted cluster is tomorrow’s lead researcher at the lab that donated the compute.
The hard part
But if one state requires it, won’t builders just move next door? Probably. A state-by-state set-aside invites a race to the bottom.
States are already trying the other route by buying compute outright. New York’s Empire AI pools nine universities, including Columbia, Cornell, NYU, CUNY, and SUNY, around shared GPU clusters. The NSF’s National AI Research Resource pilot has backed 500+ projects and is becoming permanent. Both are great. Both are a rounding error next to what the labs spend.
So the real version has to be national. Here are three possible paths:
Executive order. Tie the set-aside to what Washington already controls: federal contracts, federal land, and fast-track permitting and grid hookups. Likely the next President, not this one.
Carrots before sticks. States trade faster permits and power deals for a voluntary grant. Builders flock to the states that offer it.
Congress. The most durable solution is an act from Congress, but today that seems like the least likely to happen.
One reason for hope: this is a rare idea with friends on both flanks. Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon both say Big Tech should give something back for what it takes from communities. When those two agree, it’s worth getting curious.
Please steal this idea
The Morrill Act didn’t just build the higher ed system we know today, it decided who got to take part in the economy of the last century. If you’re a governor, a senator, a university president, or a hyperscaler looking for a better story than “we drove up utility prices,” this one’s yours. Take it. Improve it. Put your name on it.
Please, someone make the 21st Century Digital Land Grant happen.