U.S. Voters Approve Dozens of Data Center Restrictions in Midterms

U.S. voters decided on at least 41 ballot initiatives involving data centers during the November 3 midterm elections. These measures spanned dozens of states and local municipalities from California to Maine and could affect hundreds of billions of dollars in planned data center projects.

Ohio had the most pending measures with 21 in total. Eleven of those measures would either ban construction or force a pause in further data center developments. In Piqua, a city of 20,000 in west central Ohio, voters decided whether to recall the mayor and two city commissioners who supported Meta's planned $1 billion data center project.

“Americans are fed up with AI data centers.”

Meta's Piqua project would construct a data center with a capacity of up to 1.4 gigawatts and promises to bring 1,000 construction jobs to the area. Separately, a $2 billion AWS data center project was on the ballot in Sunbury, Ohio, and a $10 billion AWS project was on the ballot in Adams County, Ohio.

Voters in around 30 jurisdictions across the U.S. passed legislation to keep data centers out of their communities, according to early return data reported by the Washington Post. At least another six jurisdictions voted to ban future construction and halt planned projects.

Thirteen municipalities approved outright bans on data centers, according to Forbes. Other states featured moratoriums lasting multiple years and new processes for securing citizen approval for data center projects. Three towns in Kansas targeted high impact and utility intensive data centers, while one town in Maine voted on size limitations.

A September Pew Research Center poll found that only 4 percent of Americans believed data centers had positive effects for their area. An NBC exit poll showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters said AI data centers were a crucial factor in their down the ballot voting, and around 63 percent of Democrats said they would oppose construction of data centers in their communities.

In the second quarter of 2026 alone, at least 45 data center projects worth some $68 billion were disrupted due to local opposition, according to Data Center Watch. These trends could spell trouble for leading AI companies that are increasingly compute constrained.