Voters Pull the Plug on Big Tech’s AI Data Center Boom
China may have been the biggest winner November 3rd.
Big Tech’s ambitions around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its infrastructure just had the plug pulled.
Voters backed restrictions or rejected pro-development measures in every data-center ballot contest with results available Wednesday except one in Harwood, North Dakota.
The artificial intelligence data center boom hit a roadblock on election night, further complicating the tech industry’s historic expansion plans.
There were 41 local ballot measures in 10 states up for a vote on Tuesday that would place restrictions on the construction of data centers in different ways, according to Ballotpedia.
Voters sided against data centers in each measure except one in Harwood, North Dakota, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia and additional results gathered by CNBC on Wednesday.The City of Harwood voted against a charter rule amendment that would have required additional review before city approval of industrial developments, including data centers.
🇺🇲 America votes against the data center boom. Local bans pass almost everywhere, Texas elects a governor who ran on a moratorium, and AI infrastructure stocks slip
On Tuesday night the AI build-out lost its first big election. Voters in at least 29 jurisdictions passed bans or… pic.twitter.com/KiEb5IpYau
— The Tectonic (@thetect0nic) November 4, 2026
Local measures often won by wide margins, driven by concerns over electricity costs, water use, noise, and other environmental impacts.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall my post on China turning a legitimate American policy debate into an influence operation. X reported it removed a suspected network of roughly 200,000 inauthentic Chinese accounts, including about 200 that amplified coordinated anti-AI and anti-data-center messaging aimed at US audiences.
It appears that the Chinese were the biggest winners in the November 3rd election.
China helps foment a lot of the controversies and panics here, and it's something we need to crack down on, hard. One risk though is that legitimate concerns will get dismissed as "helping China."
"China is secretly fueling America's data center rage" https://t.co/o3fItVr6s7
— Phineas Fahrquar (@irishspy) August 28, 2026
But I digress.
In fact, positions on data centers appear to have played an important role in who people chose for congressional representation.
The national backlash to data centers has become a major political issue. Residents in Republican and Democratic cities alike have pushed back on tech companies’ plans to aggressively build data centers to power their artificial intelligence platforms. Local and national activists have raised concerns about energy costs, pollution, water use, noise, and conversion of farmland and other open spaces.
According to an NBC exit poll, 56% of voters said AI and data centers played a “crucial or major factor” in their vote for Congress.
In some communities, including 21 municipalities in Ohio, residents turned to local ballot measures or referendums in an effort to block the construction of proposed data centers. In nearly every result so far, voters overwhelmingly backed new restrictions or declined to approve measures that affirmed the buildout of such facilities.
Overall, the measures varied from outright bans on data center construction to hard limits on regional resources. These restrictions passed with an average of 70% support.
The measures consisted of varied language involving data center construction. Some asked about an outright ban. Some asked for a 180-day moratorium. Others asked about imposing technical limitations, such as on a site’s electricity or water usage. A ballot measure in Maine asked, “Shall an ordinance entitled, ‘An Ordinance to Establish a Retroactive Moratorium on Data Centers’ be enacted?”
An Ohio measure asked, “Shall the resolution enacting approval of a development and supply agreement term summary with EdgeConneX be approved?” And a Florida ballot asked, “Should the City Charter prohibit new data centers within the City?” The winning answers, respectively, were: Yes, No, and Yes. These all count as votes to restrict data center development.
The measure with the highest proportion voting to restrict was in Morgan County, Illinois, with 88.3% of the 10,663 votes cast stopping data center development. The closest vote was in Sprigg Township, Adams County, Ohio, with 52.6% voting to restrict construction of data centers.
On average, the pro-restriction vote percentage was over 70%.
Voters have sent Big Tech a clear message: Address the costs imposed on local communities before expecting a welcome mat for the next server farm.
🚨Report: 76% said they would oppose the construction of a data center in their community
56% of voters said AI and data centers were crucial or a major factor in their vote pic.twitter.com/hrxmQSR7Zx
— The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) November 4, 2026
But protecting our electricity bills, water supplies, and quality of life should not mean surrendering America’s technological future to China. Hopefully, American innovators can meet those concerns with better engineering and stronger attention to local community needs and concerns.
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Comments
I liken this whole data/AI hysteria to the Al Gore/Inconvenient Truth/climate panicans…turned out that all the global climate change freak outs were just that…people losing their minds over nothing…and hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted trying to fight it with useless and expensive “green energy” products and all kinds of regulations that do nothing, except empower bureaucrats that increase costs and grind projects to a crawl.
AI data centers are the next panican project to scare people…same folks behind it…same stupid sheeple and Chicken Littles…useful idiots.
Ask a naysayer to show someone who has made money by going green with solar panels. People will have greater savings from Data Centers when their property taxes go down or disappear entirely (state of Virginia, for example). But whining is so much easier than doing a little research…
Hold on. My electric rate went up 11% this year alone and the power company specifically pointed to Biden’s green scam and data centers. In a large number of places this concern is real.
My primary objection to data centers is not so much the facility as it is corporations and foreign entities coming in, snatching up land (often through eminent domain takings), building the data centers, and handing the bill for expanding the supporting infrastructure to taxpayers and local residents whose only connection to the data center is a shared area code.
And the owners end up getting massive tax breaks along the way. Again, at the expense of the taxpayers and locals.
These data centers shouldn’t be draining community resources. People are justifiably concerned that their property taxes and utility bills are rising to pay for services to the data centers. This shouldn’t happen.
Data Centers get approved by local planning and zoning commissions. People can voice their objections at the hearings and pressure their local officials over tax breaks; it takes organisation by the citizens but is doable if one is serious about getting results. Land sales to foreign entities should not be permitted, that takes legislation at the state level with input from voters to their representatives.
Planning committees get bought. What the peasantry thinks never counts.
Having served on a Planning Commission, I was never bought off, nor were others.
Applications that didn’t adhere to zoning regs were denied. Citizen input on problematic applications was (usually) meaningful and resulted in denied applications when the objections were valid.
Surely, you don’t suggest that it never happens.
Citizen ‘input’ is often, not always, granted, but more often than not, little more than performative kabuki theater intended to do nothing other than check a procedural box for a decision that’s already been made.
More often than not, public input meetings, town halls, and surveys, are run by PR firms, sponsored by those who want a particular outcome. Architects, engineering and construction firms that make large political donations and just waiting final approval for their massive contracts to be finalized. The PR firms report the public support for that outcome they’ve been paid to provide, without making the actual, raw, citizen input public.
If you live in a Utopia where that never happens, good for you.
I am accusing you of WrongThink. The opposition is Chinese. Nothing to do with all that you say regardless how true it is.
Off to reeducation camp for you!
Eminent domain is/was supposed to be limited to public use. For example a government owned and operated data center in washington DC area. I don’t know how you fight that and win?
2nd Amendment.
IMO the data center debate/controversy is less about data centers and far more about the ‘aggressive development’ which could be described as the arrogance of the developers ‘you rubes should be on your knees thanking us’ and their indifference to legitimate concerns.
Almost all of the legitimate local concerns can be addressed by the developers, heck they could have done so from jump and avoided much of the backlash. Instead in many cases they showed up schmoozing local officials behind closed doors, demanding tax breaks, made vague promises about job creation, tried to stiff arm questions and concerns about power generation/rising power costs and water use.
The opposition was in many ways a sort of proxy vote against Flock and the ‘internet of things’ as well as against what many in rural areas view as an unfair use of eminent domain to build out transmission lines across the landscape that doesn’t really provide the bulk of benefit to the local.area.
Add to this the less scrupulous developers who submitted proposals in multiple locations making promises they knew they couldn’t meet but still.requiring all sorts of disruption including trying to get increased power generation and transmission line commitments in place before final site selection. This had utility companies projecting costs and seeking rate hikes in advance of final selection raising power bills in some cases.
The solution is for the developers to stop being arrogant and instead be a bit more humble. Provide full transparency, agree to set a performance bond = to 3 to 5 years of full time salaries of their ‘promised’ long-term workforce, provide on site electricity generation, closed loop waters for cooling and build noise cancelling infrastructure into their plans. The issue is those things all add higher costs. Tough cookies. The ChiCom may be able to simply ignore these issues and impose their will upon localities b/c they have a totalitarian system but we don’t/shouldn’t do the same in the USA.
Much of pushback comes from site selection. People don’t want them near residential and agriculture zoned land. Keep them on land already zoned for industrial, for example near freeway where they already made the trade off for noise and other enviro impact. Sounds like they already solved the problem with water, with closed loop radiator systems. After that they should be required to pay to upgrade the grid so they don’t change their local electricity market. Those aren’t challenges that are impossible to overcome for developers. The economy also needs steel mills, and airports, and recycling centers. Data centers are much cleaner use than many other industrial uses.
There is not enough land in industrial zoned areas which is why many are going rural. Water is not an issue and most are paying for incremental power generation or building their own power plants.
This is a complete red herring issue. AI is driving GDP growth and productivity gains and, to date, there has been no impact on the job market.
I don’t believe there’s not enough industrial zoned land. The developers just don’t want to be forced to buy a dirty contaminated site by previous industrial use, and become liable for the clean up. They want a clean industrial site. That’s what pushed them into rural areas, where they don’t fit with the surrounding community.
Not enough industrial zones just in a narrow range of preferred locations? Maybe but I doubt it. There’s no question there’s plenty of existing industrial zoned land within the USA as a whole to accommodate data center build out at least for the foreseeable future.
If there’s an absolute necessity by developers to build a data center (or anything else) in a specific location then it is the responsibility of the developers to successfully sell their idea to the Citizens of that community. Supply and demand should rule the day. If that community happens to possess the scarce thing then its up to the developers who desire that scarce thing to open up their wallets and pay up enough to PERSUADE them to part with it. IOW adherence to free market principles of willing sellers and willing buyers who come together to reach a voluntary agreement to their mutual satisfaction without any coercion.
Even now, our data centers outnumber china’s by an order of magnitude. The desire for data centers is driven primarily by the need for elite capital to squeeze every cent out of the last productive industry this country has (construction) and not any desire to “beat” China. What beating China even looks like, I’ll never know. Plus this is after the bubble has been punctured leaving a trillion dollar hole in the Chinese stock market.
This obsession with other countries and not taking care of our land and people, is part of the reason we lost so bigly Tuesday. America First means putting America first in all ways and not just land and tech development. I thought we all understood that but the agendas are not aligned.
You’d think the issues — land, water, sanitation, electrical service, roads — would all be solvable problems. After all, if a big automaker such as Ford or Audi wanted to build a new assembly plant in the area, they would work out how to get it done, and the state/county/city would know what has to happen to make it work. Audi just announced a major factory in the U.S. southeast; clearly they jumped through all the hoops correctly.
So why are data centers having these issues? Yes, certainly some element of Chinese/socialist canoodling. But I suggest another issue —
— arrogance. As in, the tech bros don’t know how to play the game.
Notice Elon didn’t have any major issues with Pecan County for the new spaceport. He knew how to play the game, and he did so.
That is what needs to happen.
Geeze- who do I hate more?
Big Tech?
China?
Honestly both could die like Fauci’s Beagles and I’d celebrate with a vente iced caramel machiado.
meh. The marginal value of these new frontier models is approaching zero. The true next frontier is distilled versions of the major models that can be run on a desktop (already happening).
At the same time, China gave us coronavirus in a lab leak. If any breakout does happen (and i dont think it will but if it does), better that its confined to China. Let the Terminator AI eat their electric grid not ours.
And the middle and little companies will now be wiped out
not to mention the loss of jobs of hvac plumbers engineers construction etc etc etc
Nah that’s hysterical. Its national security issue. You don’t want to trust foreign countries with your data centers. They are going to keep building them. But there will be more oversight and regulation and it will slow down the permitting process. Data centers are actually one of the cleaner industrial uses. They just need to do it right, and do a better job of working with the community. There’s actually way too much fast money that has poured into data center stocks recently, including the data center adjacent stocks that do the construction work. Booms don’t last forever.
National Security? Perhaps through there are many more claims that could be just as valid to invoke National Security. Unless we’re gonna apply that criteria to other sectors that are equally as important for National Security then for me the argument of ‘we gotta do X or the ChiCom win’ rings very hollow.
Wouldn’t ship building and creating/maintenance of a US merchant fleet also be a National Security issue? Kinda nice to have a trained workforce of ship builders to crank out Naval Vessels. At extreme need the US Citizen Sailors of that Merchant Marine Fleet could be used to fill the ranks in our Navy/Coast Guard.
How about Agricultural sector, food supply seems important. How about timber production to supply housing materials? Mining industry? Steel mills? Lots of those domestic manufacturing, mining and mill jobs which were so easily shut down/shipped overseas seem pretty important to National Security as well. How about medical equipment and pharmaceutical production? Covid Mania demonstrated some of the problems with outsourcing. Heck we don’t make aspirin here.
nah, most of these data centers werent getting built anyway; no power and/or no transmission lines and/or the wait for a power plant from GE Verona was going to take too long (plus the nat gas lines). Most of them would have become stranded eyesores. At least when we overbuilt fiber optic after the dot-com bubble, the cables were hidden.
And the ‘dark cable’ eventually was used — Internet 1.0
If I were building a data center somewhere, in the big announcement I’d reassure the community that —
— I’m building out the needed electricity
— I’m paying for the water infrastructure
— I’m putting it into a properly zoned area
— I’m paying for the roads
— I’m putting a park, baseball diamonds, and soccer fields right next to it
— I’m making a contribution to the local library
That would handle most all community concerns.
The allies of the Democrats and the enemies of America are the real winners of the 2026 midterms: Iran and China.
People don’t like data centers because they share like NFL stadiums where the owners and players make a lotta money and taxpayer is spaying bill 20 yrs later.
As opposed to say factory with big startup costs but lotsa people make ou well in future.
This is a huge loss going forward. The data centers will be built somewhere in the world. Hopefully there are enough states in the US that will welcome data centers in their state.
Assuming of course the developers can lay hands on the frankly massive amount of capital to do so, pay the much higher borrowing cost at current interest rates and are willing to make such huge investments in Nations which may not offer the degree of property rights protection and freedom to operate as the USA does. Then there’s the potential risk that a future US Admin or Congress will ban the use of foreign data centers over concern some foreign Nations would exploit the data collected for nefarious ends.
Proof voters are stupid. They all have that little box in their had that depends on data center to answer their ignorance.
I’m not a Luddite, but I sure as hell do not trust the tech bros.
Listening to them is like listening to a magician – you pretty much have to listen to what is *not* being said, and you have to watch what the other hand is doing.
No mention of how much the AI boom has risen the cost of home computers and other electronics? Ram prices skyrocketed thanks to the AI boom and now if you are looking to replace your home computer, and not just a bare bones model, that’s become almost unaffordable for some without taking out a loan.
I am old enough to remember the anti-nuclear power hysteria of the 1970s and 80s. The end result was heavy dependence on Middle East oil, which in turn funded Islamic terrorism. We have never recovered from that massive self-inflicted wound and this latest campaign seems to be a carbon copy of that insanity.
And like the insane campaign against nuclear power, the anti-data center campaign will only bring pain and misery, although it will probably take a few years for it to become obvious. Unfortunately it will not prompt any self-examination among the diehards. One day the anti-data center warriors will look in the mirror and wonder what happened to their noses – forgetting completely that in a fit of self-righteous anger they sliced it off by themselves.
Perhaps people who have had their careers vanish due to AI actually vote. Like all advances in technology, AI MUST AND WILL BE DONE, but Trump didn’t have to be so offputtingly jubilant about it.
Sure was a noose the Socialists were pinning on Republicans neck here in Pa
1/10 the processing of micro-paying for profile-driven “targeted” ads would host “AI” beyond Micro-Bill’s tiny by comparison wet dreams.
It’s the strip mall problem. Incentives for new builds while the last round collapsing from departed incentives sits rotting.
Why displace people for new builds in the comfortable, bewutiful, spread out wilds. We have oceans, deserts n space.
Unless the displacement is the point…
One of the big complaints I keep hearing is that data center don’t create local jobs for the communities that host them. The developers bring in their outside team for the construction phase. The tenant brings in their own team to operate the data centers. The local community gets to do the janitorial and landscaping and parking lot maintenance.
The developers could provide scholarships to local high school students to study comp sci. Or provide laptop computers to high school students.
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