Tuesday's midterm elections in the United States produced three big losers: Donald Trump, Elon Musk and datacenters. The vast facilities packed with semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence and many other online products were on the ballot in at least 40 jurisdictions across 10 states, and voters delivered a strong rebuke to the giant buildings, which have become a symbol of the tech industry and AI.
In Ohio alone, at least 14 municipalities passed bans or restrictions on datacenter development, including in Sunbury, where Amazon has proposed a $2m datacenter project. In Maine, eight municipalities approved temporary datacenter moratoriums. And in Emporio, Kansas, where a 1,000-acre gigawatt-scale datacenter was recently proposed, voters approved a ban on high-impact datacenters.
Altogether, voters approved nearly every datacenter moratorium on the ballot, dozens in total. The one notable exception was Hardwood, North Dakota, a small city with a population of less than 1,000 people, where residents voted down a bill that would have imposed restrictions on datacenter development.
Even where datacenters were not explicitly on the ballot, candidates who had pushed back against their development won office. In Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa secured a historical victory as governor on Tuesday night over her Republican opponent after promising to impose moratoriums on datacenter construction. She has pledged to implement greater restrictions on, and community input into, whether datacenters can be built. Toward the end of his tenure, her Republican opponent Greg Abbott had also tried to capitalize on anti-datacenter sentiment, demanding an end to electricity subsidies for the facilities and reversing his previous stance that had welcomed them to the state.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, who became governor of Georgia, and Amy Acton, the newly elected governor of Ohio, have also pledged to implement moratoria on the construction of large datacenters. Opposition to the facilities has grown in recent months and has become a bipartisan issue: in May, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill imposing strict regulations on large-scale datacenters. Still, the election results solidified the overwhelming opposition to these centers of compute, which have come to serve as a stand-in for the ultra wealthy and for resource extraction by the AI industry.
Musk, who poured over $400m into supporting conservative candidates, reacted to the results by posting on X: "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now."
Analyst Dan Ives said the midterm results are a clear sign that the pace of datacenter buildout will start to slow. "There is no way to sugarcoat that Democrats taking control especially over the Senate will create some major hurdles for AI and tech legislation in the Beltway over the next two years," Ives said, adding that he was particularly worried about Hinojosa, whom he described as a "known anti-datacenter politician".
Ives said the biggest worry of the night for tech investors and the AI trade centered on Texas, a state expected to supply 25% to 30% of datacenter gigawatts and capacity.
