Midterm voters back limits on data centers in local measures and statewide races

In the 2026 US midterms, data centers were on the ballot, and voters mostly voted against them. According to The Verge, voters decided 45 local ballot measures on data center development. As of Wednesday morning, 33 of those results will restrict it, based on a tracker compiled by Redbud Consulting. In an NBC News poll of voters on Election Day, 76 percent said they opposed data centers in their communities.

Several candidates who won state and federal races support moratoriums on new development. They include Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa and Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed. Large data centers are the physical base of the AI industry, which depends on building them fast. The results point to slower, more conditional and more local approval of new compute.

The local measures

Many of the measures set their limits by power draw, not by building type. The Town of Wells, Maine, approved a 180-day moratorium on large data centers, backdated to mid-June 2026. Several cities in Ohio voted to ban data centers over 25 megawatts. The City of El Dorado, Kansas, voted to ban data centers with a peak electrical load over 10 megawatts for 10 years.

Limits based on load target the large facilities that AI training and inference need. Smaller installations stay legal. The Kansas ban runs for a decade, longer than the planning horizon of most current projects.

The statewide races

Texas was the biggest change. Hinojosa, a Democratic state representative, will replace Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Texas has the second-highest number of planned data centers in the country. Hinojosa supports a statewide moratorium. Abbott had taken a more measured approach: this summer he announced an audit that could slow new data centers from connecting to the state grid, though he had earlier praised their growth. In the Texas Senate race, Democrat James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton. Both men wanted to remove some tax exemptions for data centers and make them pay their own energy infrastructure costs. Talarico also stressed the facilities' environmental impact and said they should share their profits with the public.

In Michigan, El-Sayed defeated Republican former Representative Mike Rogers. El-Sayed has called for a pause on new developments "until we can do it safely and with federal protections." Rogers had called for a one-year state moratorium this summer, but not a federal ban.

In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown won back his former Senate seat from Republican Jon Husted. Brown had called Husted "the face of data centers." As lieutenant governor, Husted had helped put data center tax breaks in place. The Verge reports that a leaked National Republican Senatorial Committee memo from this summer warned that if data centers were blamed for a Husted loss, they would look poisonous to future candidates. Brown has not called for a moratorium. He has said developers should not get tax breaks, or approval without local input.

Other winners took similar positions. In Georgia, Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms favored a moratorium to review environmental and cost effects. In Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson defeated Senator Susan Collins and supports a state moratorium. Maine's legislature had passed what would have been the country's first state moratorium on data centers, but the governor vetoed it. In Nevada, Governor-elect Aaron Ford, who had called incumbent Joe Lombardo "data center Joe," now supports a pause on all tax breaks for new data centers. Ford championed a data center tax-break bill in 2015.

Not a clean sweep

The Verge notes that it is hard to draw a direct line from the backlash to any one result. Some candidates who favored fewer restrictions won. In Florida, Republican Byron Donalds, who opposed an outright ban, won the governor's race with 50 percent of the vote to David Jolly's 48.7 percent, according to NBC News figures cited by The Verge. Jolly had promised to bar hyperscalers for a year. In Iowa, Democrat Rob Sand won while opposing the moratorium his challenger supported. In Arizona, Governor Katie Hobbs and her challenger Andy Biggs both opposed a moratorium and favored power and water use standards instead.

Even so, the winners mostly agree on the details. Donalds introduced the Protecting Ratepayers Act in Congress, which would make developers pay for their own energy and water needs. Sand and his opponent both wanted to end tax breaks. In Wisconsin, both governor candidates said they would end state tax subsidies. In Pennsylvania, re-elected Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order that bars nondisclosure agreements for data center developments and takes AI data center proposals off the fast track. Across both parties, four demands keep coming up: no tax breaks, developers pay for their own grid upgrades, projects are disclosed, and local communities get a say.

What it means for work

For developers and AI companies, the work of getting a data center approved now includes ballot campaigns, public hearings and utility cost negotiations, alongside engineering and land deals. Rules against nondisclosure agreements and requirements to cover energy and water costs push projects into public view earlier and make them more expensive. That changes the jobs of site selection teams, utility planners and local permitting officials. For construction crews, electricians and the towns that counted on new tax revenue, a moratorium or a 10-year ban removes projects that were in the pipeline, though the sources give no figures on jobs affected. Communities near proposed sites gain the most direct control here, through votes on power thresholds and pause periods. Several things remain open: whether new governors in Texas, Georgia and elsewhere can get moratoriums through their legislatures, whether federal ratepayer bills advance, and whether capacity moves to places that have not voted on the question yet.