Americans voted on Tuesday. Alongside the Senate, the House and governorships, dozens of towns had something else on the ballot: data centers. Almost everywhere they came up, they lost. The Washington Post counts at least 38 jurisdictions that passed bans or restrictions. Semafor puts it at more than 30 localities across nine states.
Edgewater, Florida wrote a ban straight into the city charter. Perry, Ohio tied hyperscalers seeking tax breaks to financial and operational constraints. Texas governor Greg Abbott was an AI booster a few months ago, then promised tougher rules, and lost anyway.
Ohio is the prototype
More than half of all the measures came from a single state. 18 municipalities, 21 votes, out of 41 nationwide. At least 14 towns passed bans or restrictions on Tuesday, Fortune reports.
Sunbury approved a ban on facilities drawing 25 megawatts or more, with the full unofficial count in. Pataskala passed a charter ban on large data centers. Ashville voted to block a campus that is already under construction. In Wilmington, around 80 percent of voters rejected rezoning in four separate referendums meant to make room for a data center project.
Ohio is not a backwater here. Fortune has the state at number five in the US by number of data center projects, with companies planning up to $40 billion in AI infrastructure there by 2030, and more than 100 townships already under moratoriums or restrictions before election day. A survey of 1,650 adults by ICAPP and SurveyUSA, published last month, found 55 percent opposed to construction and 22 percent in favor; on tax breaks for data centers it was 65 percent against and 15 percent for.
“With over 100 Ohio townships adopting moratoria or restrictions, strong voter turnout against expansion would signal to statehouses nationwide that ratepayer protections, transparency, and grid safeguards should dominate policy agendas,” Keith Durkin, a sociology professor and director of ICAPP at Ohio Northern University, told Fortune.
Anthropic needs exactly these sites
For us this isn’t US domestic politics, it’s a story about compute. Anthropic’s S-1/A lists $895 billion in compute commitments, and those don’t get approved in Washington. They get approved in town councils. OpenAI renamed its data centers to “AI Compute Campuses” last week and floated speed limits for powerful AI after the midterms. That rebranding, Semafor notes, is working with mixed results.
Banks and asset managers financing the buildout already treat local opposition as a credit risk. Google stepping in to backstop Anthropic’s rent in Kentucky on the same day fits the picture.
Consent is scarcer than power
For months the argument ran on gigawatts, interconnection queues and chips. The real scarcity is something else: a campus needs a town that wants it. On Tuesday 38 towns said they are not that town, and they wrote it into charter language rather than a statement of intent. A moratorium can be lifted. A charter ban costs you a second election.
What interests me here: none of these votes were about AI. They were about noise, power bills and water use on your own street. Whoever wants to build there won’t win with benchmark numbers.