AI data center opponents are cheering midterm results, but they say the fight isn’t over

Texas resident Maggie Elizabeth Hill stayed up late on election night to watch the midterm results trickle in. But she was up early again the next morning, already thinking about how she could work with the state’s newly elected Democratic leaders to slow the development of AI data centers.

“I was so excited with the results,” said Hill, who earlier this year formed the data center watchdog group Don’t Drain Texas to help rural communities push back on data center projects. “I started brainstorming like, what can the lieutenant governor do? What are our routes to success here?”

The rapid buildout of AI data centers became a central issue in the months leading up to the midterms. Grassroots campaigns cropped up in communities nationwide, raising concerns about the local implications of massive new AI data center projects. Much of the resistance also served as an outlet for general distrust of AI and frustration with the power and wealth of tech billionaires.

Like Hill, data center opponents across the country see last week’s election results — where a staggering wave of populist, Democratic candidates won even in typically red stronghold areas — as a referendum on the issue and a significant win for their movement. They say concerns about AI data centers hiking electricity costs, harming the environment and impacting the livability of nearby communities drove members of their communities to the polls.

Nationwide, about a quarter of American voters said AI and data centers were “crucial” to their vote in the midterms, CNN’s Voter Poll found. When asked about building data centers in their communities, voters were opposed by a roughly 3-to-1 margin.

But data center opponents say the fight isn’t over.

Now, they will work to hold these newly elected officials accountable for their promises to rein in or put new guardrails around data center construction — or push them to take even harder lines. Many are seeking moratoriums on data center construction, but some simply want more transparency and greater benefits for nearby residents baked into the development process.

“I am an independent, and I definitely voted with… data centers at the top of my list, and I know so many people who are from rural communities who traditionally vote Republican who said that this was flipping them,” Hill told CNN.

Multiple candidates succeeded in tough races after making data centers central to their campaigns, including Democratic Sens.-elect Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Annie Andrews of South Carolina. Democrats pulled off a massive upset in Hill’s state of Texas, winning the state’s high-profile Senate race and unseating Republican incumbents for governor and lieutenant governor.

“When the politicians stop speaking for the people or being responsive to the people, you’re going to see a recalibration, and I believe that happened certainly” in the midterms, said Nick Owens, an attorney who founded Conserve Ohio, a group that opposes large data center construction.

Owens, a lifelong Republican and delegate for President Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention, added that Democrats “1,000%” did a better job speaking to voters about data centers ahead of the election. Meanwhile, GOP candidates had to contend with a link to Trump, who has dismissed concerns around data centers as a “hoax” and said communities who oppose them must want to be “backwards and poor.”

In Ohio, Democratic Gov.-elect Amy Acton ran on a “conditional moratorium” on data center development, which would require developers to cover energy generation costs and commit to transparency measures, among other guardrails, to have their projects approved.

But Owens said his group would push her to go further — using New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s one-year moratorium on new AI data center construction in her state as a model. He’s also hopeful that Brown could contribute to progress on federal legislation around data centers, given his previous experience in the Senate.

Across the country, many activists oppose data centers because they want to preserve their community’s land and natural resources. That’s what motivates Nancy Thellman, whose family farm in an agricultural part of Douglas County, Kansas, is around a 15-minute drive away from a proposed hyperscale data center project.

“We have people who are trying so hard to keep their farms, to keep their skills, to keep the next generation on the farm, so that food can be grown,” Thellman said. She’s concerned about “data centers coming in and taking vast swaths of prime farmland out of production for a purpose that is not entirely understood or known for the future.”

Thellman and her grassroots group, the Douglas County Data Center Watchdogs, are optimistic that the election results in Kansas will give them a greater shot at pushing state legislators to revise or rescind controversial state Senate Bill 98, which passed last year, giving tax exemptions to data center developers.

Kansas last week elected its first Democratic senator in more than 90 years, as well as a Democratic attorney general. Democrat Cindy Holscher is in the lead for governor as the final votes are counted.

Holscher, formerly a state senator, was among those who approved Senate Bill 98. But Thellman said she discussed the issue with Holscher during a cold campaign call from the gubernatorial candidate and was convinced the politician had changed her view. Holscher’s campaign site calls for a pause on data center development until more guardrails can be put in place and states that “big corporations don’t deserve taxpayer handouts.”

“She saw the error in that vote, and she made it very clear that should she be governor, she would place a statewide moratorium on data center development until reasonable guardrails could be put up,” Thellman said. “She was a politician who is brave enough and wise enough to change her mind and promise to legislate in a different way… We’ll hold her to it.”

Danielle Ray, lead organizer with the Louisville, Kentucky-based advocacy group No Data Center 502, told CNN that “our fight doesn’t change” following the election, although Democrats flipped nine seats in the statehouse. The group is fighting to stop a more than 1 million-square-foot data center project in the city.

“I believe that this has been part of the reason that some of the seats have been flipped in Kentucky,” Ray said. “But I think our concern is that it might cause folks to relax or think that the fight is over just because you know Democrats won (the) majority across the country.”