Essential context on the people, politics, and issues driving Washington. Not even a year ago, state leaders of all stripes were clamoring for data centers, the A.I.-warehouses of the future. Promises of infrastructure there.
Sweetheart deals all around. But as voters started to view the centers as a resource suck and potentially job killers, sentiment moved quicker than a ChatGPT prompt; between March and July, public opinion shifted 12 points against new data centers, according to one national poll. The result has been a massive reset of assumptions about the wisdom of these campuses of computing power.
The backlash is stealthily turning midterm elections across the country into referendums on anxieties about an economy overrun by A.I., and specifically the role of those data centers that appear to be sending both electricity bills and NIMBY-ism spiking. The shift also sets in motion a messy collision between the GOP candidates adjusting to voter sentiment and the parochial whims of their party leader. In Texas, Republican Ken Paxton rolled out a proposal on Monday to block data centers that could use Chinese technology and hold data centers responsible if those automated A.I. bots “undermine children’s safety.” It was the latest sign this month of Republicans in the red state recalibrating on the issue, following Gov.
Greg Abbott’s announcement of a pause on new data centers—after calling his state the “epicenter of AI development” in November. In Michigan, GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers last week called for a one-year moratorium on new data centers after earlier supporting their construction. His opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, has called for data centers to cover their own power costs, limit water consumption, and work with local communities to give them a “meaningful say.” El-Sayed previously said Michigan shouldn’t move forward with such projects until there were “federal-level guardrails.” And in Florida, Rep.
Byron Donalds, widely seen as the state’s next Governor after winning this month’s Republican primary, dumped more than $2 million on just one ad in his primary promising to “protect” the state from data centers. It was a stunning reversal from just a few weeks earlier, when Donalds mocked opponents of the data centers as yesteryear nostalgists. You’re not imagining the whiplash.
President Donald Trump has remained a cheerleader for the data centers, seeing the prospect of high-powered computer chips cementing U.S. dominance across all industries. It also hasn’t hurt that the Trump administration has extracted ownership stakes in semiconductor companies in exchange for funds allocated during President Joe Biden’s term. "Communities that don't take a data center, they're making a mistake,” Trump said of the swelling number of localities banning such sites during an interview last week.
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