Datacenters were on the ballot in the US midterms — and voters rejected them almost everywhere

Voters approved nearly every datacenter moratorium that was on the ballot in Tuesday's midterm elections in the US, dozens in total. Datacenters, the facilities full of semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence and a host of other online products, have become a symbol of the tech industry and AI, and voters responded with a strong rebuke of the giant buildings.

Datacenters were on the ballot in elections in at least 40 jurisdictions across 10 states. In Ohio alone, at least 14 municipalities passed bans or restrictions on datacenter development, including in Sunbury, where Amazon has proposed a datacenter project.

In Maine, eight municipalities passed temporary datacenter moratoriums. In Emporia, Kansas, where a 1,000-acre gigawatt-scale datacenter was recently proposed, a ban on high-impact datacenters was approved by voters.

There was one notable exception: Hardwood, North Dakota. The small city, with a population of less than 1,000 people, voted down a bill that would have imposed restrictions on datacenter development.

Where datacenters were not explicitly on the ballot, officials who have pushed back against their development were elected. In Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa secured a historic victory as governor on Tuesday night over her Republican opponent, and she has promised to impose moratoriums on their construction.

Hinojosa has also pledged to implement greater restrictions on, and community input into, whether datacenters can be built. Towards the end of his tenure, Greg Abbott, her Republican opponent, had also tried to capitalise on anti-datacenter sentiment, demanding an end to electricity subsidies for them — reversing his previous stance that had welcomed datacenters to the state.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, who became governor of Georgia, and Amy Acton, the newly elected governor of Ohio, have also pledged to implement moratoria on the construction of large datacenters.

Anti-datacenter sentiment has grown in the last few months and has become a bipartisan issue. In May, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill imposing strict regulations on large-scale datacenters.

Elon Musk, who poured over $400m into supporting conservative candidates, posted on X after the results: "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now."

Analyst Dan Ives said the results of the midterms are a clear sign that the pace of datacenter buildout will start to slow down. There is no way to sugarcoat, he said, that Democrats taking control, especially of the Senate, will create some major hurdles for AI and tech legislation in the Beltway over the next two years.

Ives said he was particularly worried about Hinojosa, whom he described as a "known anti-datacenter politician". The biggest worry of the night for tech investors and the AI trade, he said, was around the state of Texas, where 25%-30% of datacenter gigawatts and capacity will come from.