Voters Rejected Datacenters at the Ballot Box, Approving Nearly Every Moratorium on the Midterm Ballot

On Tuesday, datacenters were on the ballot in at least 40 jurisdictions across 10 states, and voters turned nearly all of the measures into approvals of moratoriums or restrictions. The Guardian counted dozens of them passing. The buildings, which house the chips that power artificial intelligence and many other online products, have become a symbol of the tech industry and AI. The vote was a pointed rebuke of that symbol.

Ohio produced the largest tally. At least 14 municipalities there passed bans or restrictions on datacenter development. One was Sunbury, where Amazon has proposed a $2m datacenter project. In Maine, eight municipalities approved temporary moratoriums. In Emporia, Kansas, where a 1,000-acre, gigawatt-scale datacenter was recently proposed, voters approved a ban on what the measure called high-impact datacenters.

The sweep had one notable exception. Hardwood, North Dakota, a small city with fewer than 1,000 residents, voted down a proposal that would have placed restrictions on datacenter development.

Where datacenters were not formally on the ballot, candidates who have resisted them won anyway. In Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa won the governorship in what the report describes as a historic victory over Republican Greg Abbott. She has promised to impose moratoriums on construction and to add restrictions and more community input into whether datacenters get built. Abbott, late in his tenure, had also tried to tap the same sentiment by demanding an end to electricity subsidies for datacenters, reversing his earlier stance welcoming them to the state.

Two other governors-elect have made similar pledges. Keisha Lance Bottoms, who won in Georgia, and Amy Acton, newly elected in Ohio, have both promised moratoriums on construction of large datacenters.

The opposition has grown over recent months and crosses party lines. In May, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a bill imposing strict regulations on large-scale datacenters. Still, the Guardian reports, Tuesday's results solidified what it calls overwhelming opposition to facilities that have come to stand in for the ultra wealthy and for resource extraction by the AI industry.

Elon Musk, who put more than $400m into supporting conservative candidates, responded on X: "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now."

Analyst Dan Ives read the results as a sign that the pace of datacenter buildout will begin to slow. He said there is no way to sugarcoat that Democrats taking control, especially in the Senate, will create major hurdles for AI and tech legislation in Washington over the next two years. He singled out Hinojosa, whom he called a known anti-datacenter politician. For tech investors and the AI trade, he said, Texas was the biggest worry of the night, since 25% to 30% of datacenter gigawatts and capacity will come from the state.

What to watch next is whether the winners follow through. Hinojosa, Bottoms and Acton have each pledged moratoriums, and Texas, given its share of planned capacity, is the clearest test of whether the ballot-box rebuke changes where the buildings go.