AI AND DATA CENTERS
429 local moratoriums are in force. 61% of Americans oppose new construction near them, in both parties.
The permit counter, the records office and the eligibility caseworkers all have work that AI can help carry. What fills the chamber is not the capability. It is the acreage, the water, the new power line, the tax break, and a facility somebody else owns.
The question is not whether AI comes to your county. It is on whose terms, in whose building, and on whose balance sheet.
That is what we built.
Allodial Furnace is the hardware and the software to run open-weight AI models inside a building your government already owns. Your records never leave it.
A sealed AI cabinet the size of a commercial boiler, in a building you already own, on your own balance sheet.
Not one acre. It goes in a plant room you already have.
No water consumed. The cooling loop is sealed.
No new power line. It sits behind a meter you already have.
No tax break asked for. No abatement, no tax increment financing, no incentive of any kind.
One budget vote. Bought the way your government already buys a boiler or a fire truck, not approved at a rezoning hearing.
Questions
Why is this year different?
61% opposed1
up 12 points since March. Democrats 69%, Republicans 54%, independents 53%.
As of July 19, 2026
429 local moratoriums in force2
across 42 states, out of 533 enacted.
As of August 19, 2026
"Capital alone no longer clears a site."3
As of August 17, 2026
Every one of those fights is about a facility somebody else owns, on land somebody else rezoned, drawing power somebody else's ratepayers pay to deliver. The opposition is bipartisan, it is rising, and it is not going to reverse before your next budget cycle.
None of it is an argument against the capability. It is an argument about ownership, process, and who carries the cost. Furnace is what a county buys when it wants the first thing without the second.
How is this different from a data center?
| Measure | A hyperscale facility | An Allodial Furnace |
|---|---|---|
| Asks your community for | Rezoning, a tax abatement, and a hearing | A budget vote |
| Land | Tens to hundreds of acres | Not one acre |
| Water | Millions of gallons a year | None. The loop is sealed. |
| New electrical infrastructure | Substation, transmission, interconnection queue | None. It sits behind a meter you already have. |
| Who owns it | A developer, often through a shell entity | Your government, outright |
| How it is approved | Rezoning, conditional use, public hearing, litigation | A line in the capital budget |
| Construction | Months to years | Delivery and commissioning, measured in days |
| Turning it off | Governed by a private power contract you are not a party to | You hold the switch |
| If it disappoints | The abatement is already granted | You own a machine and can redeploy it |
There is no applicant, no rezoning, no developer, no shell company, and no undisclosed end user — because nobody is asking your community to approve anything. The only decision is whether to buy a piece of equipment, made the way your government already buys a fire truck or a boiler.
What can we promise residents before anyone asks?
A Republican polling firm testing a governor's guardrails package found 82% support for guardrails, and support for a nearby facility rising from 46% to 55% once guardrails were paired with concrete benefits. Their conclusion was that whoever owns enforceable protections owns this issue.
So here are nine. They are not claims about what the equipment does. They are commitments an elected official can make in public, in writing, and take a vote on the same night.
“I'm not asking you to trust the technology. I'm telling you the nine things I've already put in writing, and I'll take a vote on any one of them tonight.”
What does it actually do?
We do not sell a general assistant and hope a department finds a use for it. Each module does one defined job, applies written rules, cites the clause it applied, and refuses anything outside the domain it was built for. What it cannot determine, it hands to a person, with the reason.
Checks a submission against your adopted code sections and returns a citation for every point checked. Sold as screening, not approval, over a defined subset — residential, accessory dwelling units, tenant improvements. Everything outside that subset is refused to a human.
Follows the federal rule set from cited record fields and assembles the determination with its citations. The caseworker decides. The machine prepares and cites; it does not approve or deny.
Exact arithmetic over the rate schedule adopted and in force on the service date, with every tier boundary, proration and exemption applied as published.
Every withheld element maps to a named statutory exemption with a citation, the response clock is tracked against your state's deadline, and the disclosure log is complete and tamper-evident.
Police narrative drafting. Open-ended advice to constituents. Risk scoring of individuals. HR screening. These are excluded by design and are not buildable without a documented override.
Americans accept AI for repetitive administrative work and reject it for high-stakes decisions about people. That finding happens to match the engineering: those are exactly the tasks where the rule cannot be written down precisely enough to be checked. We would rather name what the system will never touch than discover the limit in public.
Named in rated kilowatts, because that is how a boiler is sold — and because computing heat is produced at a coefficient of performance of one, so a single number is the electrical draw, the thermal output, and a fair proxy for capacity.
A cabinet on a 20-amp circuit
One building, a department or two
A cabinet on a 30-amp three-phase feed
A civic center or campus building
A single rack on a 300-amp service
A central facility for a whole organization
Who can see our records?
Most vendors handle this with a policy document. We handle it with architecture, because a policy is a promise and architecture is a property.
The machine is split in two. The data plane holds your records, your model, your keys and your audit log, inside an encrypted enclave. The management plane is what we touch: firmware, patches, health telemetry, signed software updates. We cannot decrypt the data plane, because we do not hold the key and the hardware will not hand plaintext to anyone who does not.
| Allodial can | Allodial cannot |
|---|---|
| Patch the host operating system, firmware and management controller | Read data-plane memory, disk or accelerator memory |
| Deliver a signed model, rule-set or software update | Decrypt anything. You hold the keys. |
| Read hardware telemetry: power, temperature, utilization, error counters | Read prompts, outputs, documents or field values |
| Verify an attestation report | Alter the audit log, which is append-only on a credential we do not hold |
| Request emergency access | Obtain emergency access without your approval, a time limit, and a session recording delivered to your log |
Criminal justice information rules reach people, not only data. Anyone with direct or indirect access needs fingerprint-based state and national background checks, and vendor engineers are not vetted. That rule disqualifies a hosted AI service on personnel grounds — and it would disqualify us too, if one of our engineers could reach your records during a support call.
So administering without reading is not an aspiration we designed toward. It is the condition of being allowed to sell to you at all, which is why it is enforced by hardware rather than asserted in a support policy.
What does it cost, and how is it budgeted?
Municipal budgets are annual, voted, and inflexible. A department cannot come back to the commission in March because officers used the assistant more than forecast. That is not a preference; it is how the institution works.
Metered AI services bill by use. The organizations that adopted them at scale learned what that means — one large technology company burned an entire annual AI budget in four months and imposed a hard per-employee cap; another moved its whole workforce off consumption billing specifically to get cost certainty. Neither had a price problem. Both had a predictability problem, and a county has far less room to absorb one.
A Furnace converts that into a capital asset with a known cost. Three lines, and there is not a fourth:
No per-query charge, no seat count, no token meter, no surprise at renewal, and no license server that can switch the machine off if a payment is late. Stop paying for support and you keep a working machine running the last version you received.
Cloud AI is a subscription to someone else's machine, metered by use, with your records in transit. Furnace is a machine you own, budgeted once, with your records never leaving the building. Both are legitimate. Only one survives a public records request and a flat budget year.
We do not sell this as cheaper per query than a cloud subscription. We sell it because the number is knowable in advance and the records stay where you can see them.
A purchased machine and a subscription are accounted for differently, and the difference often decides whether a project can be funded at all. A cabinet is tangible personal property: installment-financeable, bondable, or bought outright from a capital line. A subscription is a service contract and generally is not. Confirm the treatment with your own finance officer and counsel — we will supply the documentation they ask for.
Where do the power and the heat go?
A sealed cabinet cannot do anything with electricity except turn it into work and then into heat. All of it ends up as heat inside your building — and 63 to 77% of it is captured into your water loop at a useful temperature, with the balance warming the plant room. In a jail, a hospital, a rec center, a school or any building with year-round hot water demand, that is a line on the gas bill that gets smaller.
Water consumed: zero. The loop is sealed. Nothing evaporates, nothing is drawn from the mains, nothing returns warm to a creek. Air-cooled computing uses roughly half a gallon per kilowatt-hour. This uses none, at any outdoor temperature.
It sits behind an existing electrical service, below the large-load thresholds that trigger an interconnection study. No queue, no rate case, no cost shifted to households.
And it can be turned down. When the utility asks, or when your own emergency plan says so, the machine reduces its draw within minutes — and because you own it, nobody's permission is required. The control logic that does this is proven to hold the facility inside its power envelope under every possible sequence of work requests, to never shed work it could have placed, and to protect workloads that must not be interrupted, which for a government machine means the compliance and audit work.
That same capability is why there is no new diesel generator: it uses the building's existing backup provision, or it stands down cleanly.
Against electric resistance heating, the displacement is close to one for one. Against gas it depends on your local price spread, and we will run that with your numbers rather than ours. Against a modern heat pump the heat is supplemental and the compute has to carry the case on its own. We put the kilowatt rating in the product name precisely so that comparison gets made — and if it does not favor us at your site, we would rather you know before the capital vote.
Heat you can use, a year
Assumes a Furnace 7kW running 18 hours a day, a building that wants heat on somewhere between 180 and 365 days a year, and the published design capture fraction. The range is the days your building can use the heat; everything else is your figure.
Against gas it depends on your local price spread, and we will run that with your numbers rather than ours.
What do you not claim?
Nobody can. Research has established that a model can be tampered with in ways that are computationally infeasible to detect even with full access to every weight, and that such tampering survives ordinary retraining. A vendor who tells you their model is certified clean is describing something that does not exist.
Our position is the opposite. We do not ask you to trust the model. We build the system in which the model does not have to be trusted: it proposes, a rule engine decides, every decision cites the clause it applied, and anything outside the defined domain is refused to a human.
It offsets a meaningful share of cost through a displaced subscription, recovered heat, and grid flexibility. Each of those is defensible. Together they are an offset, not a payback, and we will show you the sensitivity rather than a point estimate.
Our warranty is narrow and factual: the checks ran, the policy was enforced, the hashes match, the log is complete. Every one of those either happened or it did not.
Narrow claims are the only kind that survive contact with an incident.
How do we start?
A capital vote is a terrible first ask. A pilot is a good one. It is small, it is reversible, it produces the operating data that makes the next conversation concrete, and it puts your county in the first cohort rather than the fortieth.
Nobody is running one yet. That is the honest answer to "who else has this" — and the first three counties set the reference every county after them will ask about.
A short note from you. Jurisdiction, building type, and which of the four workloads. A person reads it and replies.
Scoping call. We will tell you at this stage if we think the answer is no.
Site assessment. Electrical service, plant room, and what your building does with heat year-round.
Specification pack. A written configuration, every cost line sourced and dated, the estimated lines marked as estimated, the upgrade and residual position stated.
Security and records review. Your security function, your records officer, your counsel, working from the architecture. We expect this to be adversarial and would rather it happened now.
Public reading and capital vote. Specification and numbers in the agenda packet at first reading, per commitment three.
Delivery and commissioning. Days, not quarters, tested against acceptance gates we publish in advance.
Write to us with your jurisdiction, building type, and which of the four workloads. A person reads it and replies within a week.
Heat and compute. Secure, local, owned.