I’d prefer we don’t datacenter to the gills, but if we’re destined to do it anyway, they should offer free Heat/data services to the communities they’re thrust upon, and the agreement should be on the datacenter licensing so they can’t reorg out of it.
This is what property taxes are supposed to be for. If a data center is putting a load on a community, tax them based on what money is needed to pay for what’s needed to counter that load.
Money is much more flexible than barter anyway. Imagine if instead of a data center it was an abbatoir, would you compensate the community for its troubles by giving them huge amounts of free raw meat?
This is different. The raw meat of an abattoir is its product, while heat is the byproduct of a datacenter. It’s even something they do their best not to have. Distributing that to the community would be a great positive.
You should probably ask other people; my decision there is going to be a wildly unpopular hell yes. :)
If they pay you money then you can exchange that money for huge amounts of raw meat, if that’s what you really want. :)