How Montana’s ‘Right to Compute Act’ stymies data center regulation

When Quantica Infrastructure proposed a 5,000-acre data center in Broadview last August, citizen calls for the county to block the development came immediately. Seemingly overnight, county commission meetings were flooded with public comment regarding water consumption and energy rates. A petition to require two-thirds of county voters to approve any data center development circulated, eventually garnering more than 7,000 signatures.

But while the goal of the public pushback was clear, county officials were less sure whether regulating the data center’s development was even legal. A new state law — 2025’s Right to Compute Act — had effectively tied county commissioners’ hands.

“We are between a rock and a hard spot right now,” Yellowstone County Commission Chair Mark Morse said in a September interview. “We don’t know what we have the power to do.”

The law links the development of computational resources, like data centers, to constitutional rights like property and freedom of expression. As with other constitutional rights, government infringement on the right to compute is limited except in cases where the limitation is driven by a compelling governmental interest, like the preservation of public health and safety.

“Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens’ fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest,” according to the law.

Morse said that language is vague enough to leave it unclear what actions he and other county commissioners across the state can take to regulate data center development without prompting a lawsuit and risking a court’s unfavorable interpretation.

The law says [that] to take governmental action it has to be “As narrowly defined as to meet your purpose,” Morse said. “So it goes back to the question. Do I have the right to regulate them, or don’t I?”

With the Right to Compute Act making their authority unclear, Yellowstone County Commissioners asked their district court for a judgment on the constitutionality of the citizen petition in July. 

Quantica responded with its own court filing, which cited the Right to Compute Act, among other justifications, as a reason to disallow the initiative the citizen petition was attempting to qualify for the ballot.

On Aug. 11, the Yellowstone County District Court invalidated the citizen petition on the basis of its failure to meet a procedural deadline. The question of what regulatory authority the Right to Compute Act might leave to county government went unaddressed by the court. 

“If we knew the exact action we could take, it would be way easier to have this discussion,” Morse said in a September interview. “But I don’t think anybody knows what that compelling interest could be.”

Even if Morse were to identify a compelling governmental interest in regulating data center development, he said, that interest would still be subject to a court’s interpretation, meaning a data center developer could potentially file and win a lawsuit, and possibly a judgment for damages.

“You know who’s paying those damages?” Morse said. “It’s county taxpayers that end up paying if there’s a financial burden there.”

Morse also sees the value of protecting the property rights of developers, and recognizes that exercising the government’s power to limit those rights requires a delicate balancing act.

“You have to be careful, because the knife cuts both ways,” Morse said. “If you want to be able to tell me what I can do with my land, then doesn’t it follow that I have the right to tell you what you can do with your land?”

Montana’s Right to Compute Act, aka Senate Bill 212, sponsored in the 2025 legislative session by state Sen. Daniel Zolnikov, R-Billings, was the nation’s first law to protect the use of computation and private servers as a constitutional right akin to freedom of expression and private property.

Zolnikov stands by the law, which he said was initially motivated by wanting to make sure that an authoritarian government isn’t able to withhold technology from its people, as when Egypt clamped down on internet access during the Arab Spring of 2011.

Citizens are currently “able to do more effective work with computation than I think has ever happened in the history of humankind,” Zolnikov said. “So the concept is that the law is pro-rights for the use of this ability.” 

Zolnikov also has ties to Quantica, having previously worked for Broad Reach Power, whose parent company is a stakeholder in the company. Zolnikov’s wife, Katie, who is also a legislator representing Billings, received a $250 donation from a top employee at Quantica during her race for House District 44.

Asked if limiting regulation of data center development is necessary to protect the citizenry’s right to compute, Zolnikov suggested that the law offers a reasonable bulwark against over-regulation driven by “fear” of data centers.

Zolnikov also dismissed county commissioners’ fears of potential lawsuits for regulating data centers.

“As long as regulation is done for public health and safety, I don’t see why there would be any issue,” he said. “Again, but I think a lot of this … is just because politicians are trying to appeal to the people based on popularity, not based on logic.”

But county commissioners argue it’s not that simple. In Jefferson County, where two proposals for data centers have already failed for reasons unrelated to public sentiment, county commissioners are facing a similar backlash to the one prompted by the Broadview proposal.

“We’re trying to figure out lawful ways to mitigate the impacts of [data centers]. There’s a lot of people that would say no data centers at all, but I don’t know,” Jefferson County Commissioner Cory Kirsch said. “We can’t legally do that. It’s kind of a conundrum.”

But while some counties wait to act in deference to the Right to Compute Act, others have already begun a degree of regulation via zoning.

In March, when a data center was proposed in Bonner, in Missoula County, the public backlash was similar to that in Yellowstone County. A petition was started to urge the county to reject the special exemption permit the developers needed, and garnered more than 48,000 signatures in less than three months. The Missoula County Commission then passed a temporary one-year moratorium on data center development in the county through emergency interim zoning law — though Commissioner Josh Slotnick said the moratorium had nothing to do with the petition.

The moratorium allows the county time to make a permanent update to its zoning, which hasn’t changed since 2021, to manage the impacts of data center noise pollution and backup energy generation, he said.

Slotnick said he isn’t worried about legal complications based on the Right to Compute Act.

“I believe we have created [interim] zoning that is narrowly tailored to meet a compelling public interest,” Slotnick said.

The East Helena Planning Board recently passed a recommendation to remove data centers from the purviews of industrial and commercial zoning, effectively making data center development in city limits impossible.

On the other side of the state, where Yellowstone County District Court has thrown out the citizen initiative, Morse and other county commissioners are still considering strategies for regulating the Broadview data center.

At a Sept. 3 meeting, Morse brought in Billings attorney Gene Jarussi to make the case for implementing emergency interim zoning to temporarily block development, as Missoula County had done. Jarussi said state law allows such action to prevent a public health or public safety emergency. County Attorney Scott Twito argued that it would be difficult to prove such an emergency status, leaving the county vulnerable to a lawsuit based on the Right to Compute Act.

As Yellowstone County Commissioners weigh their options, the first phase of construction has begun with road-building and well work at the 5,000-acre Broadview site. 

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