Data centers' bad reputation has come for the ballot box.

AI infrastructure has emerged as one of the most politically-charged issues of the November midterm elections, with candidates leaning into issues that US voters across the political spectrum feel strongly about. In an NBC News exit poll, 56% of voters said data centers were a “crucial or major factor” in their vote for Congress, while only 13% said the issue played no role at all.

And anti-data center sentiment showed up strongly in the results. Time reported that Democratic candidates spent more than $100 million on broadcast advertising that painted Republican opponents as pro-Big Tech and data centers, allowing these candidates to win key races in Ohio, Kansas and Iowa.

Beyond the candidates themselves, dozens of local ballot measures across the country asked whether to limit or permit data center development in their communities. Redbud Consulting, a polling and data strategy firm, tracks these measures in its Data Centers on the Ballot 2026 Results.

Because the questions were worded differently for each municipality, Redbud's tracker sorts each outcome by its effect: “Restrict” for results that limit data centers and “Allow” for results that permit them. As of the time of publishing this article:

• "Restrict" results had won 38 of the 39 measures with complete counts; "Allow" measures had only won one.
• While votes are still being counted, six elections have "restrict" results leading and two elections have posted no results as of yet, "Restrict" results have 77% of the vote.

Several bills to restrict the building of these facilities were already in place prior to the election, such as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has since been re-elected, implementing the nation's first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers of 50 megawatts or more for a year back in July. The results of the midterms could turn that trickle of regulation in the US into a flood. For instance, Texas's first Democratic governor in more than 30 years Gina Hinojosa campaigned on a statewide data center moratorium.

That, in turn, could stymie the multi-billion-dollar buildout that frontier model labs are counting on to achieve the bombastic growth targets they've promised to their investors.

Our Deeper View

As it stands, the frontier AI labs are likely questioning where they go from here. The reality is, with so much on the line ahead of major IPOs, these labs aren't going to stop their relentless pursuit of compute, even as many of them call to pace frontier development. And despite the public abhorrence of these facilities, as well as the political and regulatory threats, these labs don't necessarily need to stop. Rather, they just have to become more strategic. For one, domestic data center buildouts could simply be made smaller to fly under the radar of regulators, as evidenced by reports that OpenAI and Anthropic are eyeing smaller data center facilities, such as 20 to 30 megawatt facilities. These companies can also start building out more compute overseas, such as Google's $15 billion initiative to build out data centers in Malaysia. And of course, with access to the mountains of investor cash that these companies have, don't be surprised to see an increase in pro-data center lobbying as we approach the 2028 election, which is already an industry practice.