American voters used Tuesday's midterm elections to push back against the data centres that power artificial intelligence. Local bans passed across Ohio, candidates who ran against data centres won major races, and AI infrastructure stocks slipped on Wednesday as investors priced in a harder road for the industry's build-out.
There were 41 data centre measures on local ballots across the country, and more than half of them were in Ohio, Fortune reports. Eighteen Ohio municipalities voted on 21 measures, and at least 14 passed bans or other restrictions.
Ohio towns said no
Thirteen Ohio municipalities voted on measures to ban or heavily restrict "high impact" campuses of more than 25 megawatts. In Trenton, a ban aimed at keeping out an 18-building Amazon Web Services data centre passed 80% to 20%, though it is unlikely to affect a four-building AWS campus already under construction nearby. In Wilmington, about 80% of voters rejected rezoning for four sites, and in Ashville voters backed blocking a campus that is already being built.
Ohio has more than 200 operating data centres, and companies plan up to $40 billion of AI infrastructure investment in the state by 2030, according to Fortune. An industry-linked group, Build American AI, spent at least $2.54 million on TV ads there promoting that investment.
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The largest shift came in Texas. Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated Republican Governor Greg Abbott after campaigning for an immediate statewide moratorium on data centres, CNBC reports. Texas accounts for 27% of planned US data centre gigawatts, according to Wells Fargo figures cited by CNBC, far ahead of Georgia at 7%.
On Wednesday morning Tesla fell 5%, while SpaceX, CoreWeave and Iren each dropped about 4%. Microsoft rose 5.5%, Amazon 7% and Alphabet 3%. Wells Fargo's chief equity strategist, Ohsung Kwon, had warned that a Democratic win could be "a left-tail event to the AI trade". Elon Musk responded on X: "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now".
A national issue now
An NBC exit poll found 56% of voters said AI and data centres were a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote, TIME reports. In Ohio's Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown, who wants to end data centre tax breaks, beat Jon Husted, whom his ads called "the face of data centers in Ohio". TIME also reports that the mayors of Piqua, Ohio, and Yukon, Oklahoma, were recalled over their support for data centre projects.
The industry is already adjusting. TIME reports that OpenAI plans a policy and PR campaign that includes calling data centres "AI compute campuses", and that Meta is building a bipartisan team.
