Campaigns have spent more than $45 million on U.S. ads that name data centers

Campaigns and outside groups have spent more than $45 million since January on political ads that mention data centers in this year's U.S. governor, House and Senate races, according to an NPR analysis of AdImpact data published on 5 September.

The two parties are making the same basic argument. The buildings get too many tax breaks, they push up electricity bills, and someone should put a limit on them. From January to August, more than $22 million backed Republican candidates and more than $21 million backed Democrats. Independents made up the rest. Democrats still ran almost twice as many ads, 127 to 67, and spread them across more states.

The volume has climbed with the calendar. A handful of mentions in January became 62 in June, more than 110 in July and about 164 in August. The ads cluster in competitive states, including Wisconsin and Michigan. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found 77 percent of Americans worried that data centers raise electricity costs. Two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans said they would oppose one in their own community.

That shared irritation is the political fact. President Trump has backed a rapid build-out of AI infrastructure. Strategists have told administration officials they are losing the local argument, people familiar with those warnings told Bloomberg. Annenberg Public Policy Center polling recorded a 12-point shift against data centers since February and March, across party lines.

Local votes have already drawn blood. In Utah, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams and Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry lost primaries after backing a large campus near the Great Salt Lake. Perry said the data-center fight cost him the seat. In Warrenton, Virginia, five council members who backed an Amazon project were voted out over two cycles. In Festus, Missouri, voters replaced half the city council after a $6 billion proposal. One winner called it an uprising.

Of 69 House districts expected to be competitive, 40 have data centers planned or under construction, Politico counted against Data Center Map records. Republicans hold most of those seats and a thin House majority. Pennsylvania is the sharpest overlap: four Republican-held competitive seats sit where Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro has pushed expansion, including a $20 billion Amazon plan in the east of the state.

New York's legislature passed a moratorium bill that Governor Kathy Hochul has not signed. Localities in eight other states have already banned, paused or restricted new sites, according to the Data Center Bans tracker. More than 3,000 centers already run in the United States. More than 1,000 more are in the pipeline, some of them multi-gigawatt projects.

The midterm question is no longer whether data centers are a niche zoning fight. Forty-five million dollars in ads say they are a national cost-of-living sentence. Trump is on one side of that sentence. A growing share of his own voters is on the other. The November map will show which side paid the price.