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**SEPTEMBER 11, 2026**

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“Data centers gone mad” sounds hyperbolic, but that’s exactly what vast majorities of Americans think about the next-generation-hyperscale facilities that are touching down seemingly everywhere. Anti-data center fervor has united people who otherwise wouldn’t talk politics, strategizing together to vote out the bums out who got them into this mess of higher electric bills, dwindling water supplies, and never-ending noise. Not only that—but they’re going to make very, very sure that anyone who touts them as the next economic opportunity and revenue generator gets nowhere near a place of power. This fall, local state and national candidates have make to their data center guardrail plans or bans plain—and increasingly for voters that means just plain no.

**–Gabrielle Gurley, senior editor**

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Craig Ruttle/Sipa via AP Images

Data Center of Attention [link removed]

“You’re seeing a little bit of a citizens’ revolt on all this,” says Doug Jones, marveling at the crowds turning up to his midsummer town halls in Alabama. In Westover, near Birmingham, Jones spent three hours with his audience, discussing their concerns and taking unscripted questions. In the aerospace and defense hub of Huntsville, 600 people turned up. At Troy University near Montgomery, another couple hundred came out.

What’s on Alabama voters’ minds this midterm season? Data centers.

Jones briefly served in Congress after winning a Senate special election nearly a decade ago. He’s now running for governor, and says that data centers are nudging out affordability issues once thought to be the election’s main focus. These giant facilities and the furious pace of AI development worries everyone, from true believers to Luddites. “It’s truly exploded across the political landscape like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Jones tells me in a phone interview.

Data centers have “moved to the top of the list of things that people are concerned about, because it is something they can vocalize,” he explains. “It is something that they believe that they can address directly because it’s coming at them.”

In November, Jones faces Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach. In his glory days, Tuberville dazzled the state’s passionate fans in a place where the college game is bigger than the NFL. Today, he’s the butt of jokes about living in Florida. The latest case about his residency is now pending [link removed] with the Alabama Supreme Court.

The two men have tangled before in this ultraconservative state. Coach Tuberville easily knocked Jones out of office when he ran for a full Senate term in 2020. The Cook Political Report rates [link removed] the governor’s race “solid R” and describes Jones’s chances as a “longshot.” But their election analysis allows that Jones is “quite possibly the only Alabama Democrat with a prayer of competing statewide.”

While Jones wants to take a closer look at the financial consequences for cities and towns, Tuberville is bullish on data centers as “gold mines.” Alabama voters worry that data centers don’t bring in as much money for state or local services as promised. Several years of construction jobs are a godsend for locals, but the lack of longer-term jobs, utility costs, and environmental consequences seem suspicious to Alabamians, especially rural voters seeing farmlands and wild spaces being obliterated.

Meanwhile, the AI tech bros at the MANGOS (an acronym of the leading AI firms: Microsoft, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX) float above it all, cushioned by their trillions while everyday Americans navigate the second Gilded Age.

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