Voters rebuff data centers in every ballot measure except one

The artificial intelligence data center boom hit a roadblock on election night, further complicating the tech industry’s historic expansion plans.

There were 41 local ballot measures in 10 states up for a vote on Tuesday that would place restrictions on the construction of data centers in different ways, according to Ballotpedia.

Voters sided against data centers in each measure except one in Harwood, North Dakota, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia and additional results gathered by CNBC on Wednesday.

The City of Harwood voted against a charter rule amendment that would have required additional review before city approval of industrial developments, including data centers.

In Ohio, where Democrat Sherrod Brown ousted Republican Sen. Jon Husted after casting the incumbent as “the face of data centers,” 21 local measures were up for a vote, according to Ballotpedia.

The Buckeye State, which was named America’s Top State for Business in 2026 by CNBC, has become a key battleground for the issue.

OpenAI announced in August that it secured 8 gigawatts of computing capacity at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Ohio, the largest planned AI data center campus in the world. The first phase of construction is slated to begin this year, and capacity is expected to come online in phases starting in 2028, according to the project’s website.

SoftBank and SB Energy are developing the Ohio data center campus in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. SoftBank is a major investor in OpenAI, and the two companies announced plans to invest $1 billion in SB Energy earlier this year.

Nvidia is also backstopping the project, which could cost more than $500 billion in total.

The Ohio governor’s mansion also turned blue, as Democrat Amy Acton, a physician, defeated Republican businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. Acton supports a “conditional moratorium” on data centers to ensure they cover 100% of utility costs and “exclusively build with union labor.”

Heading into the election, the AI trade was already faltering on Wall Street, with chipmakers, neoclouds and other data center-related companies selling off in October on concerns about rising interest rates and overspending. The hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta — are each spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on AI infrastructure to meet what they say is insatiable demand. All of those companies except Microsoft have turned cash flow negative in the process.

Getting data center projects off the ground may have just gotten a lot harder.

Communities in California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, New Jersey, Nevada and Wisconsin also went to the polls to weigh in on the issue, according to Ballotpedia, and data centers were a key motivating factor for voters in matters up and down the ballot.

In a CNBC Voter Poll, 56% of voters said data centers were a crucial or major factor in their decision, with Democrats ranking the issue higher than Republicans.

Democrats who…