This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
“You’re seeing a little bit of a citizens’ revolt on all this,” says Doug Jones, marveling at the crowds turning up to his midsummer town halls in Alabama. In Westover, near Birmingham, Jones spent three hours with his audience, discussing their concerns and taking unscripted questions. In the aerospace and defense hub of Huntsville, 600 people turned up. At Troy University near Montgomery, another couple hundred came out.
What’s on Alabama voters’ minds this midterm season? Data centers.
Jones briefly served in Congress after winning a Senate special election nearly a decade ago. He’s now running for governor, and says that data centers are nudging out affordability issues once thought to be the election’s main focus. These giant facilities and the furious pace of AI development worries everyone, from true believers to Luddites. “It’s truly exploded across the political landscape like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Jones tells me in a phone interview.
Data centers have “moved to the top of the list of things that people are concerned about, because it is something they can vocalize,” he explains. “It is something that they believe that they can address directly because it’s coming at them.”
In November, Jones faces Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach. In his glory days, Tuberville dazzled the state’s passionate fans in a place where the college game is bigger than the NFL. Today, he’s the butt of jokes about living in Florida. The latest case about his residency is now pending with the Alabama Supreme Court.
The two men have tangled before in this ultraconservative state. Coach Tuberville easily knocked Jones out of office when he ran for a full Senate term in 2020. The Cook Political Report rates the governor’s race “solid R” and describes Jones’s chances as a “longshot.” But their election analysis allows that Jones is “quite possibly the only Alabama Democrat with a prayer of competing statewide.”
While Trump tries to please Big Tech, data centers have gone from a sleeper issue to one of the most hotly contested topics of the 2026 midterms.
While Jones wants to take a closer look at the financial consequences for cities and towns, Tuberville is bullish on data centers as “gold mines.” Alabama voters worry that data centers don’t bring in as much money for state or local services as promised. Several years of construction jobs are a godsend for locals, but the lack of longer-term jobs, utility costs, and environmental consequences seem suspicious to Alabamians, especially rural voters seeing farmlands and wild spaces being obliterated.
Meanwhile, the AI tech bros at the MANGOS (an acronym of the leading AI firms: Microsoft, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX) float above it all, cushioned by their trillions while everyday Americans navigate the second Gilded Age.
ON SOCIAL MEDIA, President Trump has taken a stab at trying to persuade everyday people to get on board with data centers: “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign … China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
There is perhaps no greater example of the White House bubble. While Trump tries to please Big Tech, data centers have gone from a sleeper issue to one of the most hotly contested topics of the 2026 midterms. Just a year ago, public opinion on data centers was split. Today, 75 percent of registered voters surveyed in an August Heatmap Pro/Embold Research poll oppose them, with 61 percent strongly opposing them. Other recent polls have yielded similar numbers, with Democrats and independents united in opposition—and Republicans right up there with them.
“I don’t think we’ve seen a political backlash about other technologies emerge as rapidly as the one about data centers has developed,” says Darrell M. West, a senior fellow in the Brookings Center for Technology Innovation/Governance Studies program.
The nationwide pushback stems from data centers’ major downsides: spiking electricity prices, air and noise pollution, predatory land and water deals, and forgone state and local revenues. Even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has stark warnings. “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” he writes on his website. “Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.”
That’s the undercurrent at work. Data centers have emerged as a stand-in for Americans’ broader discomfort with the AI revolution. Rare are the tech progenitors like Gates who can authoritatively break down the cost-benefit equation of a technology that spits out pink slips, spawns confident-sounding chatbots, and corrodes teacher-and-student learning—advances occurring at such fantastic speeds that the average user can’t absorb one before the next appears.
“People have sort of a latent sense that something’s wrong here,” says Peter John Loewen, a Cornell University professor of government. “And data centers are a very easy way to express opposition to those things.”
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Democratic and Republican candidates are competing to come to grips with these gargantuan AI computing facilities. Don’t think so? Just talk to the good people of Festus, Missouri, who voted out four council members who burdened the city with a data center project. Elsewhere, nearly 30 municipalities have held recalls driven by data center issues.
The data center disruption reconfiguring midterm election debates isn’t a great leap backward. It’s a quality-of-life SOS for people concerned that if they don’t make their voices heard, they’ll find themselves surrounded by mammoth warehouse-like structures that no one wants to see, hear, or live near.
A COLUMNIST FOR THE NEVADA INDEPENDENT, John L. Smith, broke down the state’s situation this way: “The days of waiting for the public to cool down on this issue are over.”
The federal government’s decision to cut Nevada, Arizona, and California’s Colorado River allocations put data centers’ water usage under a microscope. Nevada will lose 17 percent of its Colorado River share for two years; southern Nevada is poised to lose 70 percent. Amid this new reality, the sector’s growing impacts have alarmed Nevada residents living in the driest state in the country.
Nye County, the state’s largest by land area, isn’t subject to the Colorado River allocations. But with the underground aquifer they rely on seriously stressed, local officials passed a total ban on data centers in August. Concerns about water have also prompted Reno to extend its data center moratorium until 2027.
“The number one issue that came up every single stop, unfortunately, was a united fear across demographics: Democrats, Republicans, independents, urban, rural, suburban,” says Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, about his statewide conversations with residents. “They want to stop their electricity bills from going up, to protect their land and their water, and transparency around what these companies are doing and how it’s going to impact them,” he told the Prospect.
There are about 70 projects in operation or in various stages of development in Nevada. By way of comparison, Virginia and Texas have hundreds. But given the water and energy constraints, it’s hard to understand how the state can sustain the industry.
Read: Take this data center and shove it
One company, Fleet Data Centers, has asked the Nevada power authority, the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada, to approve building natural gas and diesel power plants for its facilities at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center in western Nevada, since the state’s largest utility can’t meet its needs.
Nevada does have an additional power option that the AI hyperscalers are counting on: heat energy from deep inside the Earth. The state is the second-largest geothermal producer in the country after California. Google recently signed a contract with Ormat, a geothermal producer, for 150 megawatts of power to be delivered between 2028 and 2030.
Why are data center developers so invested in a place with severe water and energy problems? One reason is tax breaks. Nevada offers a sales and use tax abatement as low as 2 percent for 10 to 20 years on qualified capital equipment purchases, plus generous personal property tax cuts and other incentives.
The Nevada Independent reported that Nevada has given up $457 million in state tax revenue since the legislature approved the abatement in 2015. Over the past eight years, local governments have forfeited $537 million in sales and use tax revenues. The Governor’s Office of Economic Development only has access to projected abatements, not the actual revenue figures. The limited access raises questions about how companies are navigating the tax abatement regulations.
In what’s shaping up to be a close contest, Joe Lombardo, the Republican incumbent, has argued that data centers adhering to local regulations and behaving “responsibly” should be welcome. (Presumably, tax repeals aren’t on the welcome wagon.) His endorsement of continued development came after $2 million in campaign contributions from donors with an interest in the AI build-out.
As a state senator, Ford was one of the original primary sponsors for the 2015 tax statute. He helped gain bipartisan support for the measure as a job creation vehicle to help Nevada emerge from the Great Recession, long before AI technology and related infrastructure became commercially viable.
Candidate Ford has embraced a pause on tax cuts; auditing data centers to determine if they are upholding agreements with local governments; and canceling those agreements if they’re found wanting. He has also pledged to fight plans for data centers on federal land—a controversial proposition in the West—and to protect fresh water supplies. His energy-focused specifics include mandates that operators pay for the energy they consume and contribute to grid updates.
Nevada’s water cuts and their impact on data center development are likely to define the rest of the election season. The Center for Economic and Policy Research suggests that the crisis calls for “a moratorium on the development of new data centers in the basin while research examines current consumption levels. If data centers’ water consumption exceeds a large percentage of the home state’s allocation, new development should be permanently halted, and data centers should be relocated or dismantled.”
Ford filed Nevada’s lawsuit against the Trump administration’s cuts, and a Nevada state legislative committee finally showed its hand, moving a bill that lawmakers will consider in 2027. It would repeal tax breaks and place a moratorium on data center expansions and new construction. After the state filed its lawsuit, the Ford and the Lombardo campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on whether they would support a statewide moratorium.
“IRRESPONSIBLE, BURDENSOME, RECKLESS.” Gov. Josh Shapiro got the message. In a Facebook video touting his August executive order to decelerate hyperscale data center construction in Pennsylvania, Shapiro admitted that he was prompted by voter comments, texts, phone calls, and in-person meetings. Residents being “bullied” and “bulldozed” by data center real estate developers and lawyers? Not happening anymore on the governor’s watch. Don’t want a data center? Shapiro will say, “hell no.” Nondisclosure agreements for state officials are out; community controls are in.
The new plan is one of the more deliberate and comprehensive data center frameworks in the country. Known projects must be made public. Annual reports on water and energy consumption would be mandatory for existing data centers. The state would evaluate emissions policies for data centers’ backup generators.
Electricity pricing considerations included interventions with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to expedite new energy-sector rulemakings that would ensure that PJM, the regional grid operator, levies appropriate costs for data centers’ own energy consumption and protects residential consumers. Clean-energy generation projects would be sited on brownfields and other disused industrial sites to provide additional power.
It’s not often that a governor trying to attract economic development pushes back against an entire business sector. But it’s more surprising for Shapiro, who is making one of the sharpest 180-degree turns known to humankind. Last year, he was ready-set-go to do business with Amazon, whose $20 billion investment in AI and cloud computing data centers on multiple campuses was the state’s largest-ever capital investment deal. Shapiro had slotted Amazon into the state’s fast-track permitting program created late in 2024. Under the executive order, all data centers have been ejected from the program; future projects will not be eligible.
Up for re-election and reportedly keen on a White House run, the Amazon deal positioned Shapiro, as a business-friendly governor, ready to glide back into Harrisburg next year. The presumptive Republican sacrifice, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, has been tagging him on the reversal and on taking campaign contributions from individuals and firms with data center and AI ties.
Shapiro didn’t slap data centers with a moratorium or tax abatement repeals. But tax breaks are now contingent on meeting the state’s Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) standards, a roster of energy, environment, and transparency mandates that hinge on local approvals.
Keeping tax dollars at home may prove even more popular than moratoriums. Tax exemptions have been paused in Arizona and Illinois. But they were contentious in Virginia, a Democratic trifecta state, disrupting budget negotiations and taking the state within days of a government shutdown. Democratic state senators wanted a repeal. Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, and the House of Delegates opposed the move, fearing that it would devastate Virginia’s lucrative data center sector. The quest for repeal failed, but not before state senators obtained a major concession: a two-year energy consumption tax.
Like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s one-year ban on hyperscale data centers, Shapiro’s move is a reminder that most governors’ public-wrath radar is more fine-tuned for concrete responses than Washington’s—at least during elections, storms, or public-health crises like the pandemic. But Democratic governors aren’t the only ones scrambling. Republican gubernatorial hopefuls trying to sidestep President Trump’s data center “bigger than oil” claims include Florida’s Byron Donalds, Ohio’s Vivek Ramaswamy, and Wisconsin’s Tom Tiffany, who is so desperate to differentiate (despite a fairly modest reform plan) that he calls his Democratic opponent “Data Center David Crowley.”
In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott faced similar challenges, and paused 474 gigawatts of new connections to ERCOT, the state’s fragile and increasingly unreliable power grid. The applications constituted five times ERCOT’s record peak electricity demand, nearly all of them from data centers. Abbott ordered ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission of Texas to perform audits to discover how data centers planned to provide their own power, water, and noise abatement strategies. Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate, has also released a plan.
The Washington Post reported that Texas Republicans aren’t impressed. Their “Break Rank” movement has rejected Abbott’s stances on data centers and shifted support to his Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa, who wants a moratorium. One of her ads depicts a woman asking a chatbot: “Why is my electric bill going up?” The answer? “Greg Abbott. Abbott took $20 million in campaign donations from data center executives and companies and he gave them billions in tax breaks.”
THERE ARE SOME TWO DOZEN data center sites in Alabama, including 12 that are planned or under construction. “Historically in Alabama and like a lot of other states, if an investor comes in and dangles a $1 bill in front of a politician—they’re like a cat chasing a laser pointer. They’re going after it without really [considering] the long-term consequences,” says Doug Jones.
In April, state lawmakers in Montgomery took some very modest moves to rachet down voter fury, reducing the time period that data centers could use the state’s tax abatements to 20 years, down from 30, unless they meet higher investment guidelines. They also required data centers larger than 100 megawatts to begin paying the state’s sales and use taxes.
A separate mandate requires that data centers pay the full cost of energy they use without passing those costs on to other ratepayers. (Alabama Power froze its rates through 2027, though the utility cautions that “bills can still change with usage.”) But an Inside Climate News analysis found that the proposed data centers, once completely built out, would use more energy than “all of the homes in Alabama combined.” Alabama’s Public Service Commission must determine how to handle that demand.
Residents, Jones says, don’t have a high regard for executives at Alabama Power or the Tennessee Valley Authority, the country’s largest public power company, either. “They don’t trust when officials are telling them, ‘Oh, they’re going to pay for their own power uses. They’ll pay for their own water,’” he explains. “Electricity rates have gone up in different places, so people are looking to some of these existing monstrosities out there and saying, ‘Wait a minute, this ain’t working out for those folks the way it was represented.’”
If elected, Jones has pledged a yearlong statewide moratorium. He sees holes in the state’s data center regulations and wants to ban local officials from signing nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), create a permitting database, mandate public notices, and require ethics disclosures, among other moves. Tuberville doesn’t think there’s anything for Alabama to worry about. Any concerns are “bullcrap,” he says, courtesy of China.
Jones counters that Alabama has a serious problem. “The fear of corruption is an underlying concern that folks just don’t talk about, but we’ve just seen it too many times in this state,” he says. That fear is already on display in Birmingham, where a lawsuit has been filed against the city and Nebius, a Netherlands-based AI infrastructure and cloud company, which are working together on a data center plan in the city’s Oxmoor neighborhood. The suit alleges that the new project is advancing despite a pause to study how data centers fit into the city’s long-term planning.
SOME CANDIDATES ARE BETTER PLACED to figure out what’s at the root of voter distrust. Running for his second term in the Kentucky General Assembly, state Rep. Adam Moore, a Lexington Democrat, admits his constituents in sections of Fayette and Jessamine Counties are concerned about being left on the hook for any new infrastructure that a data center might need.
But their issues go beyond electricity prices. “[Residents’] energy costs have been going up enough anyway, so they’re already mad at their utility providers about that, so that’s not a new mad, that’s an existing mad,” he says. “Most people have never talked about NDAs … Now you hear 20 times a day [about] NDAs that have been signed by planning commission members, or the mayor, or the county judge executive.”
Brookings’ West says NDAs make people assume the worst-case scenarios about data centers. “We suggest tech companies get rid of the NDAs and be much more open about what the deal is,” he says. So far, this battle has persuaded Microsoft to dispense with local government NDAs and terminate the remaining ones.
Irritated by AI slop, less than impressed by chatbots, and wary of surveillance regimes, Americans are beginning to understand the price of failing to erect guardrails.
Yet data center construction on brownfields has been a selling point for communities interested in putting industry-scarred parcels to use that would be left vacant. Moore points to eastern Kentucky, where residents have been plagued by high utility bills. “There is theoretically excess capacity on the grid,” he argues. “So locating a data center on a brownfield that’s an old coal site actually could take the load off and actually potentially stabilize rates or maybe even drop rates for those regional customers.”
As the Industrial Revolution took hold, factories rose in the eastern sections of cities because the western prevailing winds would move the noxious emissions away from city dwellers. Loewen, the Cornell professor, believes data centers face a similar set of less-worse siting decisions that industrial-policy officials and local government leaders will figure out eventually—but not soon enough for candidates vying for votes. “It’s much harder for governors than it is for a local representative, right?” he says. “If I’m running in a congressional district, my argument doesn’t have to be ‘No data centers anywhere.’ It just has to be ‘No data centers here.’”
What does Moore expect from Kentucky’s Republican lawmakers confronted by a seething electorate in an election year? “The majority will feel a need to take action and do something. I imagine it will be focused on ratepayer protection.” Democrats, by contrast, “will take up more local transparency, and hyperscale data center tax repeals, and environmental protection,” he says. Even Moore’s Republican colleagues in the supermajority Kentucky legislature are coming around to modifying tax abatements, after a Republican Senate leader said that the levy was no longer necessary.
IN 2025, JEROME TOWNSHIP, OHIO, was strapped. Its fire department and other services couldn’t handle the 84 emergencies that two Amazon data centers racked up since 2021. One fire took about 30 hours to extinguish. Amazon had secured generous local property and state sales tax breaks for the facilities. The Jerome fire chief described data centers as having “no value added to our community,” adding that “they continue to be a drain on local and regional resources every day.” Local officials decided on a moratorium.
Outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, had sought to rectify fiscal problems like Jerome’s in May by pausing new data center tax exemptions. Like Virginia, Ohio has a robust data center presence that was a source of pride until state leaders revealed that Ohio lost out on more than $1 billion in revenues since 2024.
But these days, state and national Republicans are less concerned about the governor’s pause than they are about a “dead-heat” U.S. Senate race between former Sen. Sherrod Brown and current Sen. Jon Husted. In May, the National Republican Congressional Committee had distributed a good-news memo: “Republicans are united, well-funded, and executing a clear strategy to win in November.”
Then the real story leaked. Brown has called Husted “the face of data centers” and has laid all of Ohio’s data center origin stories and current frustrations on his doorstep. Data centers were destroying Husted and the party. “If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote, “the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.”
It has. In early September, the US Data Center Moratorium Tracker listed nearly 300 moratoriums enacted across the country in 44 states. “We do not have the luxury of moving slowly,” Gates says. “The place to start is with a process for building the right institutions before the disruption forces governments into crisis mode.” Moratoriums have emerged as the tool to jump-start these processes. But is Gates poised to be a Cassandra, with politicians and tech companies guarding their power centers no matter how many civic wounds fester?
There could have been a healthier chance for responsible AI institution-building if tech companies had been up-front about their hyperscale projects early on, rather than requiring public officials to sign NDAs and insisting on other unholy compromises. They’d be in a stronger position to handle the current backlash—or maybe there wouldn’t be one to begin with.
Transparency has never been a big business virtue. Instead, the MANGOS, among others, chose subterfuge, and now their collective credibility is shot. Irritated by AI slop, less than impressed by chatbots, and wary of surveillance regimes, Americans are beginning to understand the price of failing to erect guardrails.
If states are truly the laboratories of democracy, then the test is whether voters keep the pressure on governors and state and local lawmakers for regulations that steer the AI revolution to a more constructive, less threatening destination, instead of dithering en route to a social breakdown precipitated by mass unemployment.
“Most issues at the end of the day are nonpartisan. Politicians make them partisan to suit political gains and to maintain power,” says Moore, the Kentucky state legislator. “We’re seeing the Rs, Ds, and independent voters coming together and saying, ‘We don’t want these in our backyards.’ And if we do want them, we run slower with a more thoughtful process where we have more input and more guarantees in place.”
This article appears in Oct 2026 Issue.
