With the midterm elections approaching in November, one tech executive told The Center Square this week that many Americans, Californians included, are paying attention to the development of data centers and artificial intelligence.
The issue has become a hot-button one, as voters across the country focus on how the construction or expansion of data centers could increase electricity costs and safety concerns for residential ratepayers in states like Pennsylvania and Tennessee, according to previous reporting by The Center Square. There are also concerns nationally about water usage.
“Given that we’re in the midst of these midterms, data centers and AI are a great villain,” Wannie Park, founder and CEO of Malibu-based energy management software company Pado AI, told The Center Square this week. “It’s very easy to vilify and say ‘We’re against this,’ so we’ll see what happens after the midterms and how people react.”
According to a September 2025 survey by Heatmap Pro, an energy intelligence platform, 44% of respondents across the country supported construction of a data center near where they lived, while 42% opposed it.
Among some of the reasons respondents in that survey gave for why they would support a data center coming to their neck of the woods, some said they wanted to see the expansion of renewable energy. Other responses included that they wanted data centers to help power the digital economy, the U.S. to win the AI race against China, because they wanted data centers to generate more tax revenue or because they wanted to see the creation of more high-paying jobs.
However, a significant number of respondents were often more skeptical of those reasons than the number of respondents who found those reasons to be convincing.
In California, there could actually be room on the grid, since data centers currently aren’t utilizing most of the state’s electrical capacity.
“When you start thinking about the grid itself, and when you start thinking about how data centers operate, it is just a case study of inefficiencies and underutilization,” Park said. “When you look at the three largest investor-owned utilities, PG&E [Pacific Gas & Electric], Southern California Edison and probably [Sacramento Municipal Utility District], historically, they’re only utilizing the capacity of the grid 40%.”