Voters push back on data centers, rejecting them in almost every local ballot measure in the 2026 midterms

According to CNBC, the artificial intelligence data center boom in the United States hit a political roadblock on election night, Tuesday, November 3, 2026. There were 41 local measures in 10 states dealing with restrictions on data center construction, according to Ballotpedia. With results available on Wednesday, voters had sided against data centers in every contest but one.

The exception was Harwood, North Dakota, where voters rejected extra review of industrial projects, data centers among them. Ohio had more than half of the measures, with 21 on the ballot. Voters in California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, New Jersey, Nevada and Wisconsin also voted on the issue.

The issue also played a role in the biggest races. In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown unseated Republican Senator Jon Husted after casting him as "the face of data centers." Ohio is also home to the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, where OpenAI announced in August that it had secured 8 gigawatts of computing capacity. It is the world's largest planned AI data center campus. According to the project's website, the first phase of construction was due to start this year, and capacity would come online in phases starting in 2028. SoftBank and SB Energy are developing it with the U.S. Department of Energy, and Nvidia is backing the project, whose total cost could exceed $500 billion.

That plan may now face pushback from the governor's office: Democrat Amy Acton, a physician, defeated Republican businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. Acton supports a "conditional moratorium" that would require data centers to cover 100% of the cost of their electricity supply and build "exclusively with union labor."

The financial backdrop was already shaky. Before the election, the AI sector was faltering on Wall Street. In October, investors sold off chipmakers, "neoclouds" and other industry players on fears of rate hikes and overspending. CNBC notes that Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are each spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on AI infrastructure, and that all of them except Microsoft now have negative cash flow.

In a CNBC voter survey, 56% said data centers were a crucial or important factor in their decision, with Democrats weighing the issue more heavily than Republicans. Democratic candidates who campaigned on pausing or regulating new projects won in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia and Texas. Texas is on track to become the world's largest data center market by 2030. There, Gina Hinojosa defeated Governor Greg Abbott after accusing him of putting tech interests ahead of local communities.

These results came despite record spending by Silicon Valley. According to CNBC's analysis of FEC data, 14 of the 20 largest donor groups backed Republicans almost exclusively, and crypto, AI and online betting interests contributed more than $377 million. Elon Musk, the cycle's largest individual donor, spent at least $474 million, nearly half of it in Texas, and lost both of the state's major races. Musk wrote on X: "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now."

More political pressure is also expected in Washington. Democrats called for AI company executives to testify under oath. Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the backlash against data centers was one of the top issues of 2026 and would be only the "initial tremor" of a much bigger "AI earthquake." Rep. Robert Garcia, the presumptive next chair of the House Oversight Committee, summed it up: "Lawyer up."

Taken together, the article suggests that getting data center projects off the ground could become much harder, and that the political risk to the expansion of AI infrastructure is growing.