Just a year or two ago, their predominance was all but assumed; if anything, the expectation was that they would see expansion along with the platforms they support. Now, all that’s come crashing down spectacularly. They’re the biggest losers this election cycle. Even their most ardent boosters are scratching their heads, wondering where it all went wrong, what their future holds.
I am talking of course about data centers, the only entity that may have fared worse than Republicans in the midterms. Out of the 41 measures on the ballot across the country that addressed data centers, all but one resolved to halt them, induce moratoria, or ban them outright. Here’s J.D. Capelouto, reporting for Semafor:
American voters roundly rejected data centers nearly anywhere they were on the ballot Tuesday, a rebuke sure to rattle investors already growing skittish about the AI buildout. Residents in more than 30 localities across nine states voted for moratoriums, outright bans, and other measures, some in direct response to specific projects underway. Edgewater, Fla. overwhelmingly voted to embed a data-center ban in the city’s charter, and voters in Perry, Ohio passed a measure placing financial and operational constraints on hyperscalers seeking tax breaks. Democrats running in more than 130 federal and gubernatorial races aired anti-tech or anti-data center ads this cycle, one analysis showed.
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AI policies were not as often directly on the ballot, but candidates supported by pro-AI PACs like Leading the Future, the fund set up by VC Marc Andreessen and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, were among the night’s biggest losers. Darline Graham, the Republican senatorial candidate for South Caroline, and Jon Husted, for Ohio, were both major recipients, and were both snubbed by voters in deep red states. (In Ohio, Democrat victor Sherrod Brown had made Husted’s support for data center expansion a key talking point of his campaign, and even the Republican party admitted it was effective.)
In California’s 34th Congressional District, Angela Gonzalez Torres, a challenger from the left, handily bested the incumbent Jimmy Gomez; one of her key lines was hammering for taking AI Super PAC money, again from Leading the Future.
Fittingly, arguably the night’s biggest individual loser, apart from perhaps Donald Trump himself (and maybe JD Vance, who not only saw his 2028 presidential chances winnow, but was thoroughly embarrassed online by Mayor Mamdani), was Elon Musk. Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars backing Republican candidates this election cycle, and I’m not sure he notched even a single victory. He spent $212 million backing the GOP Texas senate candidate Ken Paxton alone, who lost to the Democratic candidate James Talarico by, at time of writing, twelve points. In Texas. Where a Democrat has not won a senate race for decades. Talarico made Musk’s outsized involvement in the race a campaign talking point about a billionaire, “even a trillionaire,” trying to buy Texas, and, as with Musk’s last foray into trying to buy an election, in Wisconsin, the project backfired dramatically.
Now, were data centers, AI, and Elon Musk, what voters were talking about most on election day? Almost certainly not, at least not for most. The biggest issues were, as usual, economic; the inflation and high costs incurred from tariffs (AI-generated or otherwise) and a disastrous war, the open corruption and self-dealing, and anger at Trump for all of it. You read these testimonials of voters who voted down-ballot Democrat for the first time in years or the first time ever, and they talk about the handling of the Epstein files, a party that’s lost its moral compass, that they no longer recognize, and you get a sense of the extent to which the anger is aimed at Trump and his enablers.
As such, pundits and AI industry allies have begun to advance the case that AI and data centers weren’t that important to the election. They do this in service of protecting their interests, of course, and in order to initiate the project of trying to make AI and data centers more palatable to a resurgent Democratic party that just took power in part by denouncing both. The primary problem with this argument is that it is pretty clearly nonsense, and it holds a rather patronizing view of voters. I am replying here to Adam Kovacevich, the head of the tech industry lobbying institution the Chamber of Progress, addressing this point:
Furthermore, if you look at the actual polls, it seems pretty clear that many voters absolutely did consider AI and data centers to play a central role when they cast their ballots. NBC exit polls showed that over half of voters cited data center issues as either “crucial” (23%) to or “a major factor” (33%) in their decision making.
Regardless, of whether voters hate AI specifically or not, I continue to argue that there are few better avatars for the 21st century American economy, which happens to be largely supported by this top-down project, built on the uncompensated mass extraction of labor, ordered, organized, and sold by elites, all with the promise of further automation, surveillance, and job degradation.
AI has already made many such elites very rich, while you may dip into your savings to pay for gas.
Anger at this fact does not need to be delineated from anger at economic precarity, wealth inequality, or at elites making wanton decisions, like entering an unprovoked war (and using AI to help run it), that worsen millions of lives; it’s all part of the same story, and that story is pretty simple and obvious to most Americans. So is the story of AI’s engine, the data centers, which have been rolled into town shrouded in NDAs, whose construction often began in secret, and brought noise, pollution, and higher electricity bills, all in service of the above described goals. They were built on a foundation of assumptions that people would not notice or that it would not matter if they did, that they would not oppose them, or would lose if they did so.
Data centers are thus not some niche line item issue, they are a microcosm for some of the chief dynamics at play in this election cycle: Distant, elite interests trying to steamroll communities they had never been to, for their own extractive benefit, and acting with impunity and unaccountability in doing so—and ultimately, getting shut down when met with actual democracy and on-the-ground organized opposition.
Nearly every victory speech I tuned into last night—Abdul El-Sayed’s, yes, but also the new Democrat senator in Iowa, Josh Turek, and even James Talarico—pilloried billionaires and powerful interests opposing ordinary Americans, and spoke of Tuesday evidencing that when united, people can confront them. Economic populism is the guiding light of the day, and that’s antithetical to AI in its current formation.
In its current formation, AI is more akin to a Trumpian project. Trump promised, blithely, no new wars and lower prices. He delivered higher inflation and corrupt self-dealing. Not to mention a host of new social ills. The AI companies promise, blithely, a cure to cancer and a fix for climate change. They deliver automation tools for corporations, a deskilling of creative workers, and a hiring freeze for recent college graduates. Not to mention a host of new social ills. No wonder it was wrapped up in this historic political blowback.
Now, there is going to be an effort to capture all the work that grassroots organizations and ordinary people have put in; such efforts are already surfacing now, in fact. Much to the delight of groups like Chamber of Progress, I’m sure, a project is reportedly underway from the big tech firms and major environmental nonprofits to co-develop standards for “responsible data center development.” The idea will likely be to sell this to newly elected Democrats looking for a way to show they’re taking data center concerns seriously while forging a potentially lucrative alliance with big tech at the same time. I have no idea what the Sierra Club and NRDC are doing here, working with Amazon and Meta is a devil’s bargain to say the least. But it goes without saying that any candidate that built their campaign on being tough on AI and data centers should absolutely steer clear of this data center ethics-washing.
The tech executive set itself has started to triangulate, too. OpenAI’s Sam Altman was first out the gate with this bit of bizarre mealy-mouthed apologia for the notion that I guess he once held that superintelligent AI should run the world.
But the best tweet was from X’s former head of product, Nikita Biers, comparing AI researchers to Nazis after World War II for some reason:
For his part, Musk made a half-assed joke intended to self-deprecate over his election-purchasing efforts and that was that.
I do get the sense that AI executives more broadly are indeed trying to process, in real-time, exactly how much trouble they’re in. For trying to influence elections, for throwing in unabashedly with the Trump administration, for developing and deploying their products with utter disregard for the social, economic, and cultural costs for everyone else.
There is, after all, an open door here, and a groundswell of support for curbing the power of Silicon Valley, for reining in the AI industry, for holding the lot of them accountable. Ultimately, the answer to that question, how much trouble they’re in, will be up to us to answer.
Some additional thoughts:
It’s pretty remarkable to me, that one of the last bits of big tech news to break before the election results started coming in, was that Google was essentially threatening to withhold its search products from schools unless they agreed to adopt its AI products. Here’s the New York Times:
Google announced Tuesday that early next year it would turn off artificial intelligence tools in its popular software for K-12 students, unless school administrators explicitly choose to make such tools available.
Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I.
But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search.
Feels like something like this is immediate, low-hanging fruit for any ambitious young Congressperson looking to cut their teeth in the taking tech to task arena. And, if we’re lucky, a relic of the era where tech giants could act so brazenly, anti-socially, and with an expectation of impunity.
For the podcast this week, we’re going to try something different. To discuss what the election means for AI, the tech lobby, data centers and beyond in greater detail, I’ll be joined by Molly White of Citation Needed and Tech Influence Watch, Dave Karpf, a professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, (and author of the forthcoming book Vaporware, Inc), and Sophie Song, a Data Center Policy Fellow at the AI Now Institute. We’ll have a roundtable chat about what did and didn’t go down during this historic election, and what we should be looking out for moving forward.
To that end, here’s Dave’s most recent blog on the election, and Molly’s diagnosis of how AI and crypto fared on Tuesday.
Finally, I was on the Tech Report talking about how AI often leads to less productivity in the workplace, and why management is still willing to embrace it.
Okay, that’s all for today. Enjoy the moment, folks, but keep those hammers within arm’s reach. Until next time.
Thanks for being an unmistakably human voice, Brian.
The tech bros are now sitting down with Vance combing all of their data so they can discredit the Dems at the next election.
Nobody lost as the cycle continues to spin. It is the tech being used that changes.