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Axios C-Suite: Oil's lessons for the AI boom
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
Mike Sommers, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, has some blunt advice for AI CEOs: apply the oil industry's strategy for winning political support for fracking to data centers and AI.
Why it matters: Data centers are the new fracking — a potential job creator and financial windfall for local communities, greeted with deep-seated, well-funded fear and loathing. It took roughly 14 years and well over $1B in ads and lobbying to win the political war and limit the public backlash.
- Sell the bill, not the breakthrough. Fracking won on gas prices, paychecks and energy independence. The U.S. produced more crude than any country in history for six straight years. AI is selling inevitability instead, and it's landing poorly in towns burned by past industrial booms. Nobody cares about AGI or solving math problems. They care about their power bill.
- Pay the town first. Shale country runs on a local contract: production taxes and corporate money fund local schools, roads and hospitals. Tech is late. These communities need to see and feel the benefit before they will open or change their minds.
- Write the neighbor rulebook yourself. At the height of the fracking backlash, API used its clout as a standards-setter to publish a first-of-its-kind "good neighbor" standard for drilling communities, covering public safety meetings and local job training to align drilling with the community's goals. It became the norm the whole industry was measured against. AI has no equivalent. No one sets the rules for how a data center treats its town, so every company improvises, and the worst project often defines the industry.
- Stop scaring the shit out of people. Sommers said the fracking revolution would've been screwed if the CEOs of oil companies were warning that their product could obliterate humanity while pitching its benefits. Normal people want hope, not sci-fi.
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