A top Senate Republican just put his support behind a nationwide data center moratorium.
“Senate Republicans trying to figure out what to do in the next 6 weeks?” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley wrote in a post on X. “MORATORIUM on data centers”.
Hawley becomes the first Senate Republican to voice support for a data center moratorium, which has so far largely been championed by progressive Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Hawley’s post comes a week after his party was dealt a decisive blow in the midterm elections. Democrats flipped seats in Republican strongholds across the nation to gain back control of both the House and the Senate. In many races where Republicans suffered huge losses, data centers became a focal point.
Complaining about tanking property values, utility bill hikes, water shortages, smog-forming air pollution, and constant deafening humming noises, Americans have turned against AI companies’ trillions of dollars in ongoing and planned infrastructure buildout dramatically. The backlash has been particularly profound in rural areas ripe with AI data center development, where locals have also expressed concerns about loss of agricultural land.
In Hawley’s home state of Missouri, the backlash has been building for months as well. Back in September, the Missouri town of Independence even voted to recall a long-term City Council member over his support for AI data center tax breaks.
The self-proclaimed “AI bull” President Trump has not hidden his disdain for this growing anti-AI sentiment. He has claimed that the communities that oppose data center development would end up “backwards and poor,” and even rebuked protestors with a simple claim that “you can’t fight it“. A group of Republican lawmakers even went so far as to call the movement a foreign influence operation led by the Chinese government.
The midterms proved that this position may now be a political liability.
Not only did voters across the country pass 40 of the 41 ballot measures restricting data center construction, including seven municipalities that voted to permanently ban new data centers, but they also picked candidates who promised stricter crackdowns and moratoriums. That was mostly Democrats.
In one of the more striking examples of bipartisan outrage over data centers, the reliably red state of Texas, which is also one of the leading states for AI data center development, elected its first Democratic governor since the 1990s. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa spent a good portion of her campaign promising an immediate moratorium on data centers.
The wins have been decisive enough that much of the tech and AI world have already begun preparations for a stricter crackdown come January, and it could come even earlier if more Republicans follow in Hawley’s lead. Trump-aligned tech giants like Palantir have begun hiring former Democratic lawmakers and government officials to help chart a path forward through the impending scrutiny. Meanwhile, OpenAI changed its tune on some controversial data center construction practices, and it promised to cover electricity and energy infrastructure costs of new projects.
“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” Elon Musk posted on X the morning after election day.
