Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.
From the Midwest to the Deep South, debate over data centers ahead of the midterms galvanized a populist wave of opposition. Americans are “now more likely to oppose candidates who are pro–data center construction, a reversal from ten months ago when these candidates would get slight support,” according to a recent Politico poll conducted by PF Global. Roughly two-thirds of Democrats and about half of Republicans said they would be “not too or not at all comfortable with a new local data center,” according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. The anxiety didn’t come out of nowhere: between March and August, the number of planned and operating projects nearly tripled. Alex Brown, a reporter who covers energy infrastructure across the United States for Stateline, which covers state policies and politics, told me that there’s lots of precedent for people “showing up to local government meetings, putting things on the ballot.” What’s new is the pace of data center construction “and the fact that there are so many communities facing these questions at the same time.” That meant, he said, that voters “were inspired by seeing pushback in another community.”
As the data center boom and backlash picked up speed, journalists made it a focus of midterm coverage—investigating the impacts on residents and interviewing locals about how these projects factored into their voting choices. That’s a major shift from even a year ago, when land deals were mostly the purview of industry publications such as Data Center Dynamics and a few attentive outlets. In 2023, Miranda Spivack wrote a story for the New York Times about tech companies looking for land on which to build data centers—an article that appeared not under business or technology but in the real estate section. Spivack—who last year published Backroom Deals in Our Backyards, about “accidental activists” who take on secret deals between local governments and private companies—said she believes that the wave of data center interest started locally. Over time, “larger media organizations started hearing about it, politicians started hearing more about it, and it became much more of a big issue, with links among many communities where they were all now experiencing the same kinds of challenges,” she said. “That changed the tenor of it, the sort of critical mass.”
The significance of data centers and the future of AI in the midterms is hard to overstate, Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter at The Verge, told me. Recently, while reporting on the backlash to data centers in Florida, she found candidates such as David Jolly, the Democratic nominee for governor, taking sides in the debate: Jolly called the Republican candidate, Byron Donalds, “Data Center Donalds.” Even where Floridians didn’t have all the technical information on data centers, “their underlying concern is still real,” Del Valle said, and may reflect concerns about resource use or job losses related to AI. “The only way to figure out what people’s anxieties and concerns are is to talk to them,” she said.
In late January, Evan Simon, a journalist with Floodlight, a small climate-focused newsroom, visited an xAI data center in Southaven, Mississippi. He flew a thermal drone alongside the site, documenting the gas plant built to power the data center. The resulting story, published in partnership with The Guardian, included drone images saturated in bright pinks and purples, showing that the data center was operating gas turbines without a permit, which experts said was in violation of the Clean Air Act. Floodlight and The Guardian also used a thermal drone to investigate the use of unpermitted generators at a data center owned by DataOne in Vineland, New Jersey. Following the New Jersey story, DataOne was fined more than a million dollars by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. In October, Zack Mullock, a Democrat who was running for Congress in New Jersey’s Second District, used Simon’s reporting in a campaign ad, chastising his opponent for downplaying news of the unpermitted pollution.
Sharon Goldman, a longtime technology journalist who covers AI infrastructure, security, and policy for Ground Level AI, her Substack, first visited several data centers across the United States last year for Fortune. At the Stargate data center, developed by OpenAI and Oracle near Abilene, Texas, the company escorted several dozen journalists around the site, she told me; Sam Altman was present. Goldman saw how “the hills were flattened,” she said, and she sensed, even then, that there would be opposition—even if it took developers by surprise. “It was all about Bring more data centers to Texas and, you know, Bring it on. Hill Country is data center country.” For Ground Level AI, she continues to track the impacts of the data center boom, both its upsides for developers and construction workers and what it means for residents being priced out of their homes. In Arizona, which she visited for Fortune and returned to for Ground Level AI last month, debates over power and water tore through state races. In the wake of the midterms, OpenAI is aiming to rebrand data centers as “AI compute campuses.”
Brown, at Stateline, told me that data centers have emerged “as a major topic, as we’re seeing unprecedented energy demand, significantly driven by the build-out of data centers.” He recently reported on local ballot measures aimed at regulating data center development, of which there were about fifty in thirteen states by Election Day, according to Ballotpedia, including Florida, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio. “A lot of people hadn’t been politically involved prior to this,” Brown said of ballot measure advocates. “One of the things I heard over and over again is, ‘I’m a Trump voter, and one of my strongest allies in this is a liberal Democrat.’”
Local journalists, beyond those in longtime tech hubs, expanded coverage in the run-up to the midterms, too. Taylor Seitz, who works on media briefings at SciLine, an initiative that connects journalists with researchers for help on technical and scientific topics, said that over the past two years, inquiries about data centers have nearly doubled—and 90 percent of them have been from local sources. These questions have changed over the past year, Seitz said—like asking for specifics about the power infrastructure being built: “I’m seeing this thing happen in my backyard. What does that mean?” That local interest is notable, since data centers are often built in news deserts. (SciLine recently updated its resource list for local reporters covering data centers.)
Local coverage has been crucial. J. Dale Shoemaker, a reporter for the Investigative Post, a small outlet in downtown Buffalo, has covered a controversial data center proposed for an industrial site between Buffalo and Rochester. Since 2023, he has shed light on the environmental review process, the six-hundred-megawatt substation—enough to power four hundred thousand homes—and the legal challenges from the Sierra Club and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, whose federally recognized reservation territory adjoins the site. Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, enacted the nation’s first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data center construction this year and made data centers a central part of her midterm campaign. With the midterms in mind, Shoemaker noted, “I encourage every local reporter to get smart on tax subsidies.”
Del Valle told me that local reporting—including hyperlocal reporting—was essential to her coverage of AI’s on-the-ground infrastructure in Arizona, published the week before the midterms. “I spoke to people who run local, county-level blogs on municipal code policies,” she told me. She also said that, in the end, while data centers were a major talking point throughout the midterm campaigns, it had been impossible to predict their impact at the polls. “I’ve spoken to people who are like, ‘I’m not voting for the candidate that aligns with my party because of their stance on data centers,’” she said. “I guess the question is: Does bipartisan opposition to data centers trump their partisan commitments?”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
