The midterm election results on Tuesday represented a sweeping repudiation of the anti-AI regulation, pro-data center policies spearheaded by the Trump administration.
“The tech industry was on the ballot, and they lost decisively,” Varun Krovi, the executive director for the Center for AI Safety Action Fund, said in an interview Tuesday. “Republicans in Congress were either unable to or unwilling to regulate this technology and put some common-sense regulation around the tech industry.”
“Democrats sang a different song, and they won decisively, and now they have to deliver,” Krovi said.
Brendan Steinhauser, the CEO of the bipartisan advocacy group Alliance for Secure AI Action and a longtime GOP operative, told me in a brief Wednesday interview that the blue tidal wave reflected voter frustration with corruption — and how voters feel that AI is mostly benefiting Silicon Valley elites. (Steinhauser pointed to Nvidia’s $25 million donation to President Donald Trump’s new ballroom.)
The data center backlash: In several key races, voters forcefully rejected data centers being built in their backyards.
South Carolina saw pro-data center candidate and incumbent Sen. Darline Graham relinquish a Senate seat to a Democrat for the first time in 28 years — despite a $2.7 million in spending supporting Graham by American Mission, the Republican-facing arm of the Leading the Future network funded by Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir executives, according to an analysis of campaign filings by Tech Influence Watch.
Graham had attacked her opponent, pediatrician and now-Sen.-elect Annie Andrews, for her proposed two-year moratorium on data center construction.
“Under her Bernie Sanders plan, a two-year moratorium, that is dangerous to our national security of our country, because in two years China is going to be so far ahead,” Graham said in a debate with Andrews. “We’re going to be in so much trouble.”
Despite tens of millions of dollars in spending by largely crypto-focused super PACs, Sen.-elect Sherrod Brown made a comeback victory and ousted Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), an incumbent who has been vocally supportive of data center construction in the state.
Husted is “often called the face of data centers in Ohio,” said an ad targeting Husted. “Why? Because John Husted spent years aggressively recruiting data centers to the state, cutting sweetheart tax deals and fast-tracking approval.”
In at least three Maine towns, Sabattus, Wiscasset and Wells, voters have already approved new data center moratoriums.
Per a tracker maintained by Ballotpedia of 41 data-center-related measures proposed on the Nov. 3 ballots, preliminary vote tallies show that voters have so far approved 33 bans, moratoriums, or new data center zoning or financing requirements or other restrictive measures in towns across the country, from Ashville, Ohio, to Janesville, Wisconsin.