Voters in local elections across the country approved dozens of measures restricting data centers on Tuesday, delivering a sweeping rebuke to the tech industry's push to build the facilities that power artificial intelligence.
As of Friday, 44 restriction measures had passed and two more held significant leads, according to the tracking website Data Centers on the Ballot. Only one result, in Harwood, North Dakota, went the way of data center supporters.
The measures ranged from outright bans and temporary moratoriums to caps on energy use, requirements for voter approval before construction, and advisory votes urging local officials to act. Besides North Dakota, they appeared on ballots in California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Margins were often lopsided. In Joliet, Illinois, nearly 80 percent of voters moved to restrict data centers. In Ohio, residents of 21 municipalities used ballot measures or referendums to try to block proposed projects, with Conserve Ohio, a campaign opposing such development, helping draft the ballot language.
More than half of the initiatives originated with citizens rather than elected officials. Data Center Resistance, an opposition group, said tech companies and their allies outspent the local campaigns by roughly 100 to 1 trying to defeat them.
This is nothing short of a political earthquake
Ed FitzGerald, director of Data Center Resistance
Opponents in Republican and Democratic communities alike have cited energy costs, pollution, water use, noise and the loss of farmland and open space. Jamil Davis, an organizer with Black Voters Matter in northern Florida, said utility bills and data centers came up almost every time he knocked on doors this fall.
Polling points the same way. An exit poll found 56% of voters said AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in their vote for Congress, and a UMass Amherst poll released earlier this year found only 11% of Americans would support building an AI data center in their community.
The national backlash cuts against President Donald Trump, who has vowed to make America the AI capital of the world, and some political analysts called the results a rebuke of him. Elizabeth Bast, executive director of Oil Change Action, said voters were fed up with unchecked data center expansion that makes their lives more expensive and urged the incoming Congress to listen.
The issue also surfaced in a congressional race in Alabama, where the League of Conservation Voters spent $300,000 on digital ads tying the data center boom to higher utility bills and targeting Rhett Marques, a Republican supporter of the facilities. Marques lost to U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures.
