Voters back limits on data centres in almost every local ballot measure

Voters in the US midterm elections on 3 November decided dozens of local ballot measures on data centres, and almost all went against the industry. CNBC reported that 40 of 41 measures, across 10 states, restricted construction or rejected pro-development proposals. Ohio alone had 21. The exception was Harwood, North Dakota, where voters rejected an added review of industrial projects that would have covered data centres.

That was an early count, and trackers were still updating theirs as later results came in. The measures were local, in specific towns and counties, so they show where the issue ran hot rather than a national verdict.

The measures sat inside a larger result. NPR, citing Associated Press race calls, reported on 4 November that Democrats had won both chambers of Congress, flipping seven Republican-held Senate seats. These were calls, not certified results. CNBC said data centres featured in several of the high-profile races: Sherrod Brown beat Senator Jon Husted in Ohio, Amy Acton won Ohio’s governorship while backing what CNBC described as a “conditional moratorium”, and Gina Hinojosa unseated Texas Governor Greg Abbott after attacking the pace of the buildout. In a CNBC voter poll, 56% of voters called data centres a crucial or major factor in their vote, with Democrats rating it higher than Republicans did. Establishing what drove any individual result is harder than the poll figure suggests, since the same elections turned on prices, the economy and much else.

Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech conference on 4 November, said the industry had “not done as good a job as we needed to explain the benefits of these investments” and that she expected building to be harder, TechCrunch reported. She said Meta has data centres in 23 states, and that its approach is to pay for its own electricity and hire locally. These were conference remarks, not a company filing.

The results followed a summer in which polling turned against local data centres and President Trump’s 21 October statement that new large data centres should supply their own power. Within two days OpenAI published a community compact for its own campuses, and protesters occupied a Microsoft site in Amsterdam as demonstrations spread across Europe.