Try this one. Hummingbirds have a tiny paired bone near the base of the tail. How many paired tendons does it support? If you have no idea, you’re in good company — so, until very recently, was the most powerful artificial intelligence ever built.
The question comes from Humanity’s Last Exam: a final exam written not for students but for machines. Nearly a thousand experts from more than 500 institutions across 50 countries each contributed the hardest question from their own field — 2,500 problems you cannot Google your way out of, spanning mathematics, medicine, law, and ancient languages. When it was released at the start of 2025, the best models scored around 8 percent. A human expert, in their own field, scores about 90.
I’m telling you about a test most of us would fail because of what happened next. Eighteen months later, the leading models — Claude, Gemini, GPT — are clustered near 45 percent. From 8 to 45, on a test built to be unbeatable. They are still failing more than half of it, and anyone who tells you this is magic wants something from you. But a curve that steep doesn’t ask whether the machines keep climbing; it asks what is fueling the climb. The answer isn’t clever code. It’s raw computing power — buildings full of it, exactly like the one proposed for the old Hoku site on River Park Way.
What these buildings make — and why here
We call them “data centers,” which conjures warehouses of filing cabinets. Wrong picture. A modern AI data center doesn’t store your data so much as it thinks. Its product is measured in “tokens,” and a token is a small unit of raw intelligence: a sentence of legal analysis, a working piece of software, a step in a diagnosis. That kind of work used to be scarce and expensive. These buildings turn electricity and silicon into it, by the unit, at a price that keeps falling while the quality climbs. The cost of starting a business, writing its software, drafting its contracts has collapsed — and it isn’t the property of Silicon Valley. It’s a feedstock, like power or bandwidth, and you decide what to build with it. This is the most entrepreneurial moment any of us will live through.
There is also a physical reason this work belongs here rather than Phoenix, and it’s one the community gets to keep. After the computing itself, a data center’s biggest cost is cooling. The industry measures efficiency as “power usage effectiveness”: a hot-climate plant runs around 1.5, burning a half-unit of cooling for every unit of computing, while in our cold, dry air, a well-built plant reaches about 1.15. Take a 100-megawatt computing load. In Arizona, it pulls roughly 150 megawatts off the grid; here, about 115. That 35-megawatt difference — a cooling cut well past 25 percent, by geography alone — is some 307 million kilowatt-hours a year. The average Idaho home uses about 11,000, so that single facility, built here instead of the desert, leaves the annual electricity of nearly 28,000 homes — roughly every household in Pocatello — on the grid for the rest of us. Valued at the rates households pay, that is around $34 million a year in power that never has to be generated, and even at the industrial rates the operator pays, it is a savings of roughly $18 million a year on its own power bill. The cold we grumble about every February is, for this industry, an asset — and it’s ours.
It’s coming whether we say yes or no
In May, the hearing examiner denied the permit for the Lex project at the Hoku site. By the standard I set in the first of these articles — trust, verify, and bind in contract — that was very likely right for that application. A shelf company asking a town to take its word on water, noise, and remediation hadn’t earned a yes. Saying no to a bad deal is not saying no to the future.
Because the future isn’t waiting on our vote. 150 minutes up the interstate, Meta’s $800-million campus near Boise goes live this year, with a second billion-dollar park behind it. Across the Montana line, there is a billion-dollar project at Butte and, near Broadview, a 5,000-acre campus signed for as much as a full gigawatt — close to what an entire state’s utility serves on an average day. The wave is here. The only question each town answers is whether it shapes the wave or gets shaped by it.
The fine print that decides everything
Look at how our neighbors tax this. Montana assesses large data centers at 0.90 percent of market value — the rate an ordinary homeowner pays — while ratepayers there watch their power bills climb. That is extraction. Idaho’s own incentive, since 2020, is a sales-tax exemption on servers and construction materials — note the word: sales tax, not property tax. By default, the land, buildings, and fixed improvements still go on the local rolls.
But here is the fine print worth knowing. Idaho Code 63-602HH exempts a company’s property value above $800 million, within a single county, from property tax. A single right-sized facility — the kind I am describing — sits under that line, so every dollar of it stays on the rolls. The risk arrives later: an owner who expands or consolidates past $800 million watches the excess quietly vanish from the tax rolls, and counties can also grant their own multi-year exemption, under 63-602NN, to sweeten a deal. So the upside is real, but it is never automatic. It is a choice.
A suggestion for the council and the commissioners
If I were advising the city and county — as a neighbor who builds this infrastructure for a living, not as a lawyer — I would want three protections in ink. First, no discretionary property-tax exemption unless the community receives something of equal, measurable value in return: the building pays its way from day one. Second, a change-of-control and make-whole clause — if the facility is ever sold, expanded, or restructured in a way that trips that $800 million shield, a payment in lieu of taxes keeps the community’s revenue whole, no matter whose name is on the deed. Third, a community-benefit payment to the city, negotiated up front and funded by the very advantage that brought the operator here: our climate. The county’s attorney can draft the mechanism; the council only has to decide it wants the protection. You don’t hope the revenue survives a future buyout. You write it down.
The number that changes the conversation
So let me show the math for one facility, done right — with the assumptions in plain sight. Suppose water, power, and noise are genuinely solved: closed-loop cooling, the facility paying its own electricity instead of riding on your bill, sound limits in an enforceable permit. What does one building actually do?
Assume it puts $500 million in taxable real property on the rolls — conservative for a project whose headline investment runs into the billions, since the servers depreciate and are largely exempt. At the combined local rate the rest of us already pay, about 1.2 percent, that is roughly $6 million a year in property taxes, flowing automatically to the county, the city, the schools, and the highway district, with no resident paying a dollar more. Then add the negotiated piece: a community-benefit payment to the city worth a quarter of the operator’s climate savings — about $4.5 million a year — leaving the operator the other three-quarters as its reward for choosing our valley.
Now put that against the city’s books. The City of Pocatello levies about $35.9 million this year, more than half of it property tax, and building this budget, it faced a deficit near $1.3 million, closing it by cutting community grants down to a $31,500 line for local nonprofits and drawing down reserves. One well-structured facility would send the city on the order of $6 million a year: its share of the property tax, plus the full community benefit. That is nearly a fifth of the city’s entire levy, several times the gap that just forced those cuts, every year, from one building. Restore the grants, rebuild the reserves, and still have room to trim the property-tax ask. The distance between austerity and stability is one well-structured data center.
For a typical homeowner, the direct effect is more modest — a $500 million addition to the county’s $10.3 billion base trims everyone’s rate by a few percent. The point is to prove, in public, on our terms, that the model works: the building pays, the community collects, the contract holds. Today it’s a data center; tomorrow, it could be a robot or car factory. These developments will enhance our economic ecosystem. This is how small towns evolve.
What to do — and why
You do not have to love this future to be ready for it; you just have to stop treating it as something that happens to you or as something that will never happen. It’s like suggesting that a hammer or a wheel should never have been invented because they would assist in building roads on the land. As an individual, learn to point these tools at a real problem in your own work — a clinic, a farm, a shop, a classroom — and turn it into something that pays. The cost of trying has never been lower. As a community, demand the structured deal: real property tax, the facility covering its own power and water, and every promise bound in a contract that survives the next buyer.
The exam in the headline measures what machines cannot yet do. The more important exam is the one we are taking, as a town: when the most powerful technology of our lifetimes shows up at the edge of the Portneuf Valley, do we meet it with fear, or with terms? I know which answer keeps Pocatello in charge of its own future.
If this gave you something to think about, share it with one neighbor who hasn’t made up their mind. The conversation only works if the whole town is in it.