Voters drew a 25-megawatt line: how the AI data-center buildout became a midterm issue

The most concrete AI vote on Tuesday's ballot was about substations, not chatbots. In Sunbury, Ohio, a suburb north of Columbus, voters appear to have written a ban on data centers of 25 megawatts or more into the city charter, a measure Fortune reported was aimed at a possible hyperscale Amazon project. Pataskala approved a similar charter ban. In the village of Ashville, about 82% of voters repealed a council resolution that would have exempted an EdgeConneX campus — two large buildings and an on-site natural-gas plant on roughly 195 acres — from the village's own moratorium, the Scioto Post reported with all four precincts in. Trenton passed a ban aimed at an 18-building AWS plan, about 80% to 20%.

Ohio was the epicenter, not the exception. Ballotpedia counted 41 local data-center measures in 10 states going into Election Day, 21 of them in Ohio; 28 were written to limit development and 13 to make it easier. By late Tuesday, Stateline, citing the Data Centers on the Ballot tracker, reported 33 restriction measures had passed or were leading, with about a dozen more still unreported and only one measure, in North Dakota, breaking the builders' way. Tom's Hardware identified it Wednesday as a Harwood, N.D., industrial-review measure that failed. Counts differ by source — Fortune said at least 14 Ohio municipalities passed restrictions, Euronews said 15 — and will move as counties finish, but every count shows restriction measures winning by wide margins.

What a 25-megawatt line actually rules out

The 25 MW figure that keeps appearing in ban language — Sunbury's charter amendment uses it, and Ballotpedia notes the same threshold in measures in Ottawa, Kan., and Mandan, N.D., where a vote is set for December — sounds technical, but it is doing precise political work. A facility pulling 25 MW around the clock would use about 219 million kilowatt-hours a year. The Energy Information Administration put the average U.S. residential customer's annual purchase at about 10,800 kWh in 2022, so a 25 MW site running flat out consumes roughly what 20,000 homes do. The wires and substations to serve that load have to land on someone's rate base.

By the standards of the AI buildout, though, 25 MW is small. A Morgan Stanley estimate cited by Bisnow counts 284 planned data centers in Texas, Pennsylvania and Georgia totaling more than 33 gigawatts, which works out to an average of roughly 115 MW per project. The large AI campuses at the center of the buildout are typically planned at hundreds of megawatts or more. A 25 MW cap leaves room for an enterprise server hall or modest colocation building but rules out the hyperscale AI campus. An ICAPP/SurveyUSA poll of 1,650 Ohio adults, reported by Fortune, found 57% would back a proposed constitutional amendment barring new data centers above 25 MW, with 20% opposed.

Why the fight runs through the power bill

The cost argument behind these measures is real but often overstated. In the PJM Interconnection, the grid covering all or part of 13 states and Washington, D.C., utilities pay generators through capacity auctions to guarantee supply years ahead. Those prices hit records three years running, and PJM's independent market monitor found that current and projected data-center load raised capacity costs by $9.3 billion, or 174%, for the 2025-26 delivery year compared with a no-data-center scenario, according to PolitiFact. Forbes reported that the auction spikes added roughly $16 a month to an average Ohio residential bill. A Dallas Fed estimate cited by Forbes put the data-center lift to U.S. wholesale power prices at 6.9%.

Wholesale is not retail, however. PolitiFact rated Mostly False Sen. Elizabeth Warren's claim that bills near large data centers had risen by as much as 267% over five years: the figure came from a Bloomberg analysis of wholesale prices at individual grid nodes, and wholesale supply is only about 30% to 50% of a residential bill, with transmission, distribution and taxes making up the rest. Harvard's Ari Peskoe told PolitiFact the core grievance holds, since grid spending for data centers is typically spread across all ratepayers; a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report adds aging infrastructure and equipment costs as other drivers.

Tax incentives are the second pipe. Several Ohio measures targeted abatements directly: Perry voters, by more than 87%, Fortune reported, required developers seeking tax breaks to offer the village financial guarantees. In the ICAPP poll, 65% of Ohioans opposed data-center tax breaks,, one reason incentive repeal became a campaign plank.

From zoning boards to Senate seats

In Ohio, Sherrod Brown made data centers the spine of his Senate comeback, running ads that branded Republican Sen. Jon Husted "the face of data centers in Ohio." CBS News projected Brown the winner; Time put his margin at five points. Brown argued for ending data-center tax breaks and Husted had supported them, Fortune reported, though NBC reported he introduced a Senate bill in July requiring utilities to charge large data-center operators enough to cover the costs they create. An August memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, quoted by Time, had warned that data centers were "the anchor hanging around Husted's neck." In the governor's race, the Associated Press reported that Democrat Amy Acton defeated Vivek Ramaswamy. Acton had proposed a conditional moratorium; Ramaswamy countered that residents of a community hosting a data center should no longer pay for home electricity, the Ohio Capital Journal reported.

In Texas, ABC News projected Democrat James Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton for Senate, 55% to 43% with 94% of the expected vote in, and projected Democrat Gina Hinojosa would unseat Gov. Greg Abbott. Talarico attacked "sweetheart tax deals" for Big Tech, Time reported. On the infrastructure itself the governor candidates were not far apart: Abbott ordered a halt to new data-center grid connections while state agencies audited projects' power and water needs, then had state environmental regulators pause permitting, while Hinojosa pledged an immediate moratorium, per Bisnow.

The national read comes from the exit poll conducted by SSRS for NBC News and other networks. As reported Wednesday, 56% of voters called AI and data centers a crucial (23%) or major (33%) factor in their vote for Congress, and 76% said they would oppose a data center in their own community. Among the crucial-or-major group, 64% backed the Democratic candidate and 34% the Republican, according to a Unite.AI summary of the poll. That is an association within one survey, not evidence the issue flipped a race; affordability broadly dominated, and Blue Rose Research tracking cited by Time ranked AI 29th of 39 issues, though its salience rose more than any other issue's over the past year. Time also reported that Democrats spent more than $100 million on broadcast ads tying Republican opponents to Big Tech and data centers.

Not a one-party revolt — and not a consensus to stop

Opposition did not sort neatly by party. Heatmap's October poll, conducted by Embold Research, found 58% of Republicans opposed a data center near their home, down from 66% in August. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has rejected the idea that the right policy is "to just give Big Tech whatever they want," NPR reported. Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers endorsed a one-year construction moratorium, Abbott said developers had "dug their own grave," per Euronews, and Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Stacy Garrity called for repealing that state's targeted data-center tax exemption, Bisnow reported. Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist and CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, said on election night, as quoted by Time, that voters were "overwhelmingly in support of AI safety and security."

The case for building has not gone away either. President Trump has framed data-center expansion as essential to beating China in AI, called communities that resist "making a mistake" and, in September, dismissed the pushback as "all a hoax," according to Euronews. Build American AI, a group linked to the pro-AI Leading the Future super PAC, spent at least $2.54 million on Ohio TV ads touting $40 billion in investment and more than 95,000 jobs, Fortune reported, citing DeSmog — figures that are the ads' own claims. And polling cited by Forbes found a plurality of Americans still want the country to keep building data centers if they come with stronger protections for electricity customers and nearby communities. Elon Musk, the cycle's top donor ($446 million per Time, $474 million per Euronews), posted afterward that "data centers in space" looked "pretty appealing right now."

What it means for the buildout

Many local votes will not touch projects already under construction; Fortune noted that Trenton's ban likely leaves a nearby four-building AWS campus unaffected. Their real effect is on siting risk. Developers now have to price in a referendum, not just an interconnection queue. Writing before the vote, Bisnow reported Morgan Stanley's view that the 33 GW pipeline in Texas, Pennsylvania and Georgia hinges on the outcome of state-level races.

Federal preemption offers the industry little cover here. Congress's effort to bar state AI rules collapsed when the Senate voted 99-1 in 2025 to strip a moratorium from the budget bill, and President Trump's December 11, 2025 executive order, which set up a Justice Department task force to challenge state AI laws, calls for a federal framework that would preserve state authority over AI infrastructure other than general permitting, according to a Greenberg Traurig analysis.

Expect pressure in three places: utility commissions writing large-load tariffs that make data centers pay up front for grid upgrades; legislatures revisiting incentives both parties now criticize; and developers' own outreach to host communities. Tuesday did not stop the AI buildout. It made the bill for it a campaign issue, and developers now have to show voters who pays.