People across America rejected data centers during last night’s midterm election. Proposals related to data centers were explicitly on the ballot in more than 40 races across 13 states. People voted against data centers in 38 of them and counting. Six cities voted to ban data centers outright and 12 put limits on the amount of megawatts such buildings could draw. In addition to specific ballot measures, candidates who supported data centers lost across the country.

One of the most striking repudiations of pro data center politicians was in Texas, where Gregg Abbott lost a bid for a fourth term as governor. Abbott had made Texas a data center friendly place. The state has more than 300 working data centers and there are plans to double that number. “Texas is the epicenter of AI development,” Abbott said in 2025 at a press conference with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.” He went on to accept more than $9 million from data center-related donors.

When public sentiment turned against data centers, Abbott attempted to ride shifting political winds by issuing a “pause” on new projects. The pause wasn’t real. Texas regulators continued to approve data center projects after Abbott’s announcement and only shut down the state’s permitting web portal when 404 Media reported it.

Gina Hinojosa, Texas’s Democratic governor-elect, made Abbott’s stance on data centers a central part of her campaign. Abbott’s words about making Texas a data center-friendly AI state played on TVs and the internet over and over again. He lost by more than 700,000 votes.

Anti-data center candidates overwhelmingly won statewide races across the country. In Burgin, Kentucky, mayoral candidate George Hensley lost his bid after voting to approve a hyperscale project—to a write-in candidate. Hensley was the only name on the ballot, and he lost to Joe MonroeTK, who ran an anti-data center write-in campaign. Emporia, Kansas — where police arrested a school teacher for clapping during a data center related city meeting — passed a ban on high impact data centers. In Yukon, Oklahoma the mayor lost a recall election after he supported a hyperscale data center project.

"These midterms sent a clear message — people don't want to see data centers in their backyards,” Michael Whitesides, the deputy communications director for Local Progress, told 404 Media. “Across the country, people do not see the promised benefit of these data centers, and the AI they power, playing out in their daily lives. They're seeing basic goods and services get more expensive while these billionaire backed monstrosities take up space in their community, poison their air, and drive up their utility bills.”

Local Progress is a network of local elected officials. Over the past year, its members have become increasingly focused on data centers as a top political issue. “Last night, we saw local, state, and federal officials who backed data center deals lose their seats,” Whitesides said. He noted that Kim Rooney in Asheville, North Carolina and Amanda Rodrigues in San Marcos, Texas (both members of Local Progress) were elected mayors in their cities after running anti-data center campaigns.

“Big Tech will continue its typical playbook of trying to buy and bully local officials into complying with their demands for more data center development, but our hope is that last night's results are a clear signal to local leaders that they can resist and their community will back them up,” Whitesides said.

American voters in the communities where they’re being built hate data centers. They run up power bills, burn through water, and power Silicon Valley’s  AI apparatus. America rejected data centers last night as both symbols of the big tech oligarchy and a physical manifestation of the future it wants to build. It’s a future Americans seem willing to fight.

Elon Musk, one of the night’s big losers, took a break from a weeks-long posting spree on X as the election results rolled in. Musk spent half a billion dollars on the midterms, $224 million of it in Texas, the state where he lives and does a lot of business. The world’s richest man wanted to cover the state in data centers. Those plans aren’t looking good now that Abbott is out and Hinojoa is in.

Musk broke his election day posting silence a little after 1 am. “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” he said on X. Chased off the land by its people, the billionaire looks to the sky.

Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico that “we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” referring to ChatGPT users dying, people losing their jobs to AI, and the other negative externalities we have seen from AI. 

Altman wasn’t running for office Tuesday. But this worldview—that the masses must shut up and suffer while oligarchs centralize power, self-deal, spend wildly to capture the political process, and automate away human endeavors so they can amass yet more wealth—was wholly repudiated in Tuesday’s election as people in Red States, Blue States, and Purple States rejected the cruelty, corruption, and depravity economy we’ve seen over the last few years. They are tired of kleptocracy. 

The main difference between Donald Trump’s administration this term and his first term is that Silicon Valley’s oligarchs have lined up to kiss the ring; look no further than the photos from his inauguration and his gilded gala with China’s President Xi Jinping earlier this fall. Every major tech company CEO has spent the last two years flattering Trump, giving him gifts, and trying to capture the political process. They have been generously rewarded for their fealty and their money as the Trump administration has spent the last two years letting Big Tech do whatever it wants. 

Elon Musk was given the keys to the federal government and used them to slash critical government programs, lay off tens of thousands of public servants, and replace collective human expertise with teenaged idiots and AI algorithms. His companies have continued to rake in billions in government contracts, his busted AI has been integrated into critical government systems, and the cuts led by his “Department of Government Efficiency” has, conservatively, killed many thousands of people around the world. Trump has pardoned crypto criminals, his family has made billions of dollars in cryptocurrency scams, and has overseen the rise of a gambling and prediction market-based “economy” rife with insider trading and misery (the idea of the administration doing anything to crack down on this is so implausible that to even suggest it could happen is laughable). He has installed manosphere podcasters, X trolls, and conspiracy theorists into top administration roles; they have performed even worse than their already low expectations. He has leveraged commercial surveillance companies to build a brutal, tech-powered mass deportation campaign. His government’s communications strategy can be described in no other way than inscrutable AI slop shitposting. This is to say nothing of the cost of living crisis Trump has caused as he’s started an illegal war in Iran that has driven up gas and diesel prices and levied tariffs on America’s allies for reasons that defy explanation. This has driven up the price of everything even as Trump’s administration slashes regulations on fossil fuel companies and big corporations.