Voters across 10 states delivered a sweeping rebuke to the tech industry's artificial intelligence buildout on Tuesday, backing limits or bans on data-center construction in nearly every local ballot measure that put the question to them.
According to Ballotpedia's tracking, 41 local measures on data centers were on ballots in California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio and Wisconsin. Voters sided against data-center development in all but one of them, with tallies varying slightly by outlet as final results came in.
Ohio accounted for the largest share of the votes, with 21 measures across 18 jurisdictions — and opponents of development won in every one. In Wilmington, four rezoning proposals tied to data-center projects were rejected by roughly 80 percent to 20 percent. In Edgewater, Florida, more than three-quarters of voters backed a charter change prohibiting new data centers, and voters in El Dorado, Kansas, approved a 10-year ban on high-impact data centers by 71 percent to 29 percent.
The only outcome widely described as favorable to the industry came in Harwood, North Dakota, where voters rejected a charter amendment that would have required independent review and public hearings before large industrial projects, including data centers, could proceed.
Exit polling suggested the issue cut deep. Fifty-seven percent of voters told exit pollsters that artificial intelligence will do more harm than good, and a CNBC voter poll found 56 percent said AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in their vote for Congress. An August poll of registered voters found 75 percent opposed a new data center near their home.
The industry spent the final days before the election trying to soften its image. On November 1, OpenAI renamed its data centers "compute campuses," and the next day it announced a Grid Protectors Program pledging future facilities would cut power use when the grid is strained. On November 5, two days after the election, the company announced a National Community Compact and a Compute Campus Policy Blueprint promising greater transparency and oversight — acknowledging it had "to listen to and react to" how people voted.
The fight is not over. More votes on data centers are expected in Arkansas on December 1 and in North Dakota on December 15, and some of Tuesday's measures were advisory rather than binding, leaving final decisions to local officials. But the scale of the rejection — in state after state, in communities large and small — has already reshaped the politics of AI infrastructure, just as investors are reassessing the data-center boom. On Thursday, the Nasdaq fell 5.52 percent into correction territory amid fears of a clampdown on data centers after Democrats swept the midterms.
