Earlier this week, President Donald Trump wandered into the data center debate, making life considerably tougher for Republican colleagues facing tight races in the November midterms. Trump’s Cabinet has followed suit, even though a recent Economist/YouGov poll found that just 14 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans think new data centers are good for America. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently made the dubious claim that data centers “don’t use water,” contradicting both widely available evidence and his own comments last year that the facilities “suck” water.
In recent months, Big Tech has ramped up spending on U.S. data centers, which are crucial for the artificial intelligence boom, just as backlash against data centers has exploded nationwide, amid concerns they could drive high electricity prices and drain water supplies to cool the massive facilities. The five biggest “hyperscale” tech companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Oracle — are projected to spend more than $560 billion on AI infrastructure this year, while the pace of data center construction in July was up about 60 percent year-over-year, according to the Census Bureau. By 2027, data center demand for power in the U.S. is expected to double.
An estimated two-thirds of the data centers built since 2022 are located in areas of high water stress, many of them in the western U.S. Amid this whirlwind of spending and criticism, red and blue states alike are considering bans. In July, New York issued the country’s first statewide moratorium on large data center construction, which will last for one year.
Facing an uphill battle to win over the public in the midterms and beyond, the AI sector has leapt into action, pouring millions of dollars into an already record-setting midterm cycle of corporate spending. The super PAC Leading the Future has raised $140 million for the midterms, according to , with plans to donate to pro-AI candidates of both parties. That includes $50 million from the influential pro-AI venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and another combined $25 million from Greg Brockman, the president of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, and his wife Anna, according to the Federal Election Commission. (The founders of Andreessen Horowitz supported Donald Trump during the 2024 election, though one of the venture firm’s founders also later donated to Kamala Harris, while the Brockmans have been among the top Trump donors since.) Anthropic, the creator of Claude, has reportedly donated at least $40 million through a dark money nonprofit called Public First Action, which boasts a $100 million war chest.
Elon Musk’s super PAC has a similar cash pile, while Facebook owner Meta is linked to a variety of PACs with tens of millions of dollars ready to deploy. All told, AI companies have pledged about $265 million to super PACs and political groups in the 2026 elections, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. Alongside cryptocurrency and betting companies, AI is the leading industry spending money on this year’s cycle.
By this past June, the 2026 midterms had already seen a record 40 percent more corporate spending than the 2024 election. Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, AI technology has matured and the companies behind it have come to dominate the U.S. economy. It was only a matter of time before they started spending like it on political campaigns, according to Brendan Glavin, director of insights at the transparency group OpenSecrets.
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