A “booming backlash” against AI data centers is shaping the midterm election – candidates cutting ads touting their anti-data-center credentials, protesters showing up at campaign events, industry players taking note – which will come as genuinely useful news to anyone who has spent the past year getting their information exclusively from NBC News.
The network’s framing is that last year’s elections in a handful of states revealed the hyperscale buildout as a major tension point up and down the ballot, and that the fight has now intensified into a full midterm issue – with demonstrators displaying “Stop Data Centers” signs at President Trump’s Michigan appearance on Sunday – the protest movement having now reached the point where it greets the president of the United States at his own events.
According to the report, Republicans, Trump included, have shifted toward ensuring data centers do not drive up voters’ power bills, which is what happens when the polling gets loud enough to be heard over the donor calls.
A June Yale Program on Climate Communication poll cited by CNBC found 58% of registered voters oppose data-center construction in their own area – including 53% of conservative Republicans, which is not a demographic famous for agreeing with the 74% of liberal Democrats who feel the same way. More than 300 cities, towns and counties have enacted bans or moratoriums on hyperscale construction, per a count by The Information, and Data Center Watch tallied 75 major projects worth more than $130 billion delayed or canceled in the first quarter of 2026 alone – roughly matching the damage from all twelve months of 2025. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the nation’s first statewide moratorium this month, voters in Monterey Park, California passed a permanent ban at the ballot box, and in April an unknown attacker fired 13 shots into the home of an Indianapolis councilman who had voted for an AI facility, leaving a note reading “No Data Centers,” per The Week – the point at which a land-use dispute stops being a land-use dispute.