Candidates Backing Data Center Pauses Could Win in Up to 15 Governor’s Races

As data centers have gone from obscurity to the top of voters’ minds, midterm candidates are taking a stance on the issue. The fight is most heated in races for governor, the office that has shown the most power to limit data centers on a broad scale. Whichever candidates win, more doors are likely to close on the industry, leaving it with fewer places to build and higher costs where it still can.

In 21 of the 36 states electing a governor on Tuesday, at least one major-party nominee backs a data center moratorium, according to The Information’s analysis of candidate platforms and public statements. Both nominees back pauses in five states (Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon and Texas), and a candidate promising a pause is likely to win in three (Maine, New Mexico and New York), based on recent polls. In seven more, it could be a close race between a candidate who backs a pause and one who doesn’t (Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin and Vermont). Those 15 states are home to more than a third of the U.S. population.

They are also home to some of the country’s biggest data center projects. OpenAI’s Stargate project with Oracle has massive sites in Texas, Michigan and New Mexico. SoftBank’s SB Energy plans to build an 8-gigawatt campus for OpenAI in Ohio. Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia have lined up Texas sites. In Georgia, the Atlanta metro area has overtaken Northern Virginia as the busiest market for data center construction, according to real estate firm CBRE.

In three of the states holding gubernatorial elections next week, sitting governors have already paused new large-scale data center projects: Kathy Hochul in New York, Greg Abbott in Texas and Tina Kotek in Oregon. Hochul’s opponent, Bruce Blakeman, calls her pause “crazy” but trails far behind her in the polls. Abbott’s opponent, Gina Hinojosa, who wants an even broader pause of any new approvals, calls Abbott’s pause “an election-year stunt” on her campaign website, saying, “We know that goes away on November 4.”

Democrats make up most of the bloc backing moratoriums, but it’s not a clean partisan split. In Maryland and Iowa, the Republican candidates support moratoriums while their opponents don’t, though these two candidates trail in their races.

Even if candidates aren’t pushing data center pauses, some of them hope to rein in the industry in other ways. Of the 46 top nominees not calling for moratoriums, 38 back at least one restriction on data centers.

One of the most common alternatives to pauses is ratepayer protections—policies that make sure the costs of powering giant AI campuses don’t raise household electricity bills. That option echoes the voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge President Donald Trump asked tech companies to sign in March, as well as a bipartisan bill passed in the House and blocked in the Senate that would have pushed state regulators to make data centers cover their power costs. Because the bill would not actually require states to adopt standards, Senate Democrats spiked it, calling it “toothless.”

Other candidates want to end tax breaks for builders, add environmental and water protections, require union labor or ban nondisclosure agreements in public deals. Hawaii is the only state where neither candidate for governor is campaigning on data center restrictions.

Data centers are on everyone’s lips, but in some places, other tech issues are also on the ballot. Some candidates are calling for AI legislation mandating model safety reviews and child safety protections. At least a dozen candidates have weighed in on the presence of Flock Safety cameras after privacy concerns and police misuse drew backlash from some communities. A couple of candidates have plans for crypto and prediction markets.

Whether hopefuls will actually follow through on their promises is another question. Our tally takes the candidates at their word.

Nationwide Drama

Opposition to data centers bubbled up quickly from the local level, as shown by The Information’s ban tracker. At the year’s start, only about 40 towns and counties had bans in place. By August, there were over 500 bans, driven by worries about power bills, water usage, noise and blight.

In the court of public opinion, data centers are losing. In an August poll from Pew Research Center, six in 10 U.S. adults said they would be uncomfortable with a new one operating in their area, with more than half calling them bad for the environment and half considering them bad for home energy costs. Few saw a bright side: Less than a quarter agreed they would be good for local jobs or tax revenue.

Association with the industry has become a liability, prompting candidates to brand their opponents with derisive nicknames.

In Nevada, Democrat Aaron Ford dubbed his opponent, Republican incumbent Joe Lombardo, “Data Center Joe”—and the state Democratic Party set up a website to match. In Wisconsin, Republican Tom Tiffany called his rival, David Crowley, “Data Center David” (though Crowley backs a “de facto moratorium” and Tiffany doesn’t.) In Oregon, the state Democrats dubbed Christine Drazan, their opponent, “Data Center Drazan.”

In Alaska, Republican Bernadette Wilson called Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, who goes by JKT, “Chat JKT,” based on donations to his campaign from Anthropic employees. However, he backs a moratorium and she doesn’t, though she said she’d never “allow Alaska to be littered with hyperscale data centers that take our resources and spoil our lands.”

In Michigan, which is at the center of both the build-out and the backlash, Republican John James has gone after Democratic candidate Jocelyn Benson’s husband, an executive at a firm involved in the state’s Stargate site. Benson’s campaign says he has recused himself from any state-related work and points to money the James campaign has taken from data center developers. For what it’s worth, both candidates say they back a moratorium.

Georgia’s Keisha Lance Bottoms and Ohio’s Amy Acton have asked their opponents to divest from tech and data center investments.

Even some of the industry’s biggest backers are recalibrating. In July, Alabama’s likely winner, Tommy Tuberville, called data center concerns “bull crap.” Now his ads say, “Politicians get the headlines, big tech gets the tax break, and working families get stuck with the bill.”

Donors with a stake in data centers are writing big checks to favored candidates. Since July 2025, Abbott has raised about $9 million from people and companies the Texas Tribune links to data centers. In Florida, Republican Byron Donalds and his PAC have taken at least $1.5 million from data center developers and others in the industry, Politico reported. Feuding AI PACs have aligned behind Donalds, too: Both Leading the Future, supported by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz, and Anthropic-backed Public First Action have spent $2 million each on ads backing the candidate, Bloomberg reported.

Same Name, Different Policies

The word “moratorium” has become popular enough for candidates to attach it to very different policies.

But not all are equal. They vary in duration: Some locales have paused building for just 45 days, others for three years. Many moratoriums are in place to buy time while lawmakers decide on more permanent standards for data centers.

They vary in scope, too. Some moratoriums apply only to facilities above a certain size, usually measured in electricity use. New York’s 50-megawatt cutoff rejects larger campuses that train frontier AI models but lets smaller projects through. Most candidates pledging pauses haven’t said where they’d draw the line, but many are aiming at the biggest projects.

And some moratoriums look more like a list of guardrails going by a trendier name. Ohio’s Acton backs a “conditional moratorium,” which would approve data centers meeting certain labor and siting conditions, according to her campaign website.

Each statewide ban so far has leaned on the same lever: halting new environmental permits. Abbott has also frozen new electric grid hookups, while Kotek has stopped deals on state land.

Not every governor thinks they can do that. New Hampshire incumbent Kelly Ayotte says she can’t act alone and would need to pass a pause with the state’s budget for next July. Her opponent, Cinde Warmington, says she’d sign an executive order on day one.

Whatever happens Tuesday, the AI and data center industries are already readying themselves to navigate narrower paths.

In the initial public offering filing Anthropic released last week, the company identified moratoriums and other restrictive measures as a business risk, naming measures by New York and Texas. Anthropic said regulatory challenges are part of why it’s expanding its international data center footprint. SB Energy and neocloud Nscale named the same risks in their filings to go public.