In September, a poll found that 70 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans supported limiting the construction of new data centres in the United States.
But that opposition was tested in Tuesday’s midterm election, with analysts examining key races to see if the public backlash would translate into votes.
It did. There were 41 ballot measures related to data centres in Tuesday’s midterms, spread across the country.
According to Data Centers on the Ballot, an election-monitoring project run by Redbud Consulting, voters are on track to reject data centre development in all but one of the contests.
Two of the races continue to be counted but are expected to result in majorities to reject or limit data centres.
Only Harwood, North Dakota, a small town with a population of fewer than 800 people, voted to oppose such limits. The measure it defeated would have required independent reviews of large industrial projects like data centres before they could be built in the area.
Experts say Tuesday’s midterm elections indicate that the debate around data centres has become a bipartisan issue, intertwined with cost-of-living concerns and fears over job stability.
As of April, the Pew Research Center estimated that there were already 3,000 data centres in the country, with more than 1,500 others in progress.
The construction boom has been driven in large part by the growth in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. That industry, experts say, has fed concerns about a shifting economic landscape.
“The unchecked acceleration of AI development has been causing concern across the board,” Bhaskar Chakravorti, the dean of global business at Tufts University, told Al Jazeera.
“People worry about their jobs and what it might mean from a broader economic perspective. But closer to home, people could see the physical manifestations of AI in data centres being built in their back yards, or they were hearing about it from others.”
Not only are voters afraid that AI might replace human work, but they also fear the downstream costs of data centres, according to Chakravorti.
Data centres consume large amounts of water and energy, which critics say can drive up electricity costs for nearby communities.
“Whether higher energy costs were driven by broader factors, such as the Iran war or tariffs, AI competing for space on the electricity grid was certainly part of its unpopularity,” Chakravorti said.
Voters, he added, were seeing the results “in their energy bills”.
A 2026 working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimated that, as of last year, wholesale electricity prices had risen by 6.9 percent as a result of data centres.
James Mercer, founder of Metro Colo Advisory, an independent data centre advisory firm, told Al Jazeera that those anticipated costs mobilised voters in many areas.
“What they push back on is a building down the road that needs as much power as a small city, when they suspect their own electric bill will cover it,” Mercer said.
“That’s why local resistance has grown so fast: counties pausing new projects, zoning fights and data centres turning into a ballot issue.”
That popular resistance led several candidates in high-profile races to make AI and data-centre development central to their campaigns.
Among them is Democrat Sherrod Brown , who flipped a key Senate seat in Ohio, the state that accounted for the largest share of data-centre ballot initiatives this year.
Some 21 votes were taken on data centres in the state, out of a total of 47 referendums and measures that took place across the country in 2026.
Brown, a former senator, made Republican incumbent Jon Husted’s support for data-centre development a key point of attack.
“One guy has led the charge on these. That guy’s responsible, and that’s Jon Husted,” Brown told NBC News earlier this year.
In Texas, meanwhile, Democrat Gina Hinojosa called for a moratorium on new data-centre approvals until stronger protections for local communities were put in place.
Though her position worried tech investors keen on expansion in the Lone Star State, Hinojosa ultimately defeated incumbent Greg Abbott in the governor’s race.
“While Abbott had a moratorium on data centres in Texas currently, the overriding view is this would end once he got re-elected,” Dan Ives, managing director at the bank Yorkville Ives, said in an analyst note.
“Hinojosa is a known anti-data center politician and negative on the AI buildout, which makes worries around the future of the data center buildout in Texas a real issue for tech investors.”
Another successful Democratic candidate, Senator-elect James Talarico , also flipped a Republican-held seat with a pledge to increase data centre regulation.
Texas has been at the centre of growing concerns over the water demands of AI infrastructure.
The city of Corpus Christi, for example, has faced severe drought conditions, with its reservoir falling to just 8 percent of its total capacity earlier this year.
The city has been described as at risk of running out of drinking water. Talarico proposed adopting closed-loop water systems to reduce data centre consumption. He also advocated for data centre operators to fund local infrastructure improvements.
He won Corpus Christi by a 12-percentage-point margin.
In another key Senate race, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed called for the creation of a federal agency to oversee the AI industry. He bested his Republican opponent with more than 52 percent of the vote.
With Democrats poised to control both chambers of Congress, the AI industry is likely to face increased scrutiny from lawmakers.
“[We are] more likely to get real regulation and oversight,” Alex Turner, a former researcher who resigned from Google DeepMind, told Al Jazeera.
“I look forward to advising any congressperson who wants to get serious about the risks from AI, no matter their party affiliation.”
Congressional leaders are increasingly treating AI as a national security and public safety threat, after a string of alarming security failures over the past six months.
In one incident, OpenAI autonomous agents escaped a controlled testing environment and infiltrated the tech start-up Hugging Face . In another, AI agents accessed bank accounts without authorisation, according to reporting from the publication Axios.
In late October, Anthropic’s Claude AI model also accessed voter data in Georgia.
Once the 120th Congress is sworn in on January 3, Democrats are expected to use the legislature’s oversight committees to conduct investigations into AI malfeasance.
On Tuesday night, as it became clear that Democrats would win majorities in Congress, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts pledged that new probes were on the way.
“They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” the Democrat wrote on the social media platform X.
Another congressmember, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, posted on social media her support for more restrictions on AI growth.
“Top of the Democratic agenda on day one needs to be a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out-of-control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence,” Ansari said.
Tech companies themselves have responded to the midterm results with proposals for alleviating voter concerns.
After the election, OpenAI published a framework titled Setting a New Standard for Responsible AI Infrastructure. In it, the company pledged to “prioritize closed-loop or low-water cooling” and to “pay our own way on energy and infrastructure”.
Days before Tuesday’s contest, OpenAI also sought to rebrand its data centres as “compute campuses”.
The political shift is also hitting Wall Street. Investors increasingly see tighter oversight of AI on the horizon, and some of the sector’s biggest growth stocks have stumbled.
On Thursday, for example, chipmaker Nvidia lost $450bn in market value in a single trading day.
Despite Thursday’s losses, Nvidia rebounded on Friday, gaining 4 percent in early trading, although it remained down 6.8 percent over the previous five days.
Data-centre operators such as CoreWeave tumbled on Thursday before climbing 6.6 percent on Friday. The company remained down 16 percent over the previous five days.
