Big Tech bet big on Trump ahead of the midterms, and it backfired. A blue tsunami overpowered largely pro-AI Republican candidates across the country — even, crucially, in Texas, where the election has now imperiled vast plans for data center construction.
But industry insiders, it seems, are in denial that the midterms are actually a rebuke against tech, Ars Technica noted.
Take Adam Kovacevich, a former Google exec and CEO of Chamber of Progress, a tech industry trade group and policy coalition that was formed with backing from heavyweights like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple.
“The results offer little evidence of a voter mandate to crack down on AI or data centers,” Kovacevich said, per Ars, noting that “Democratic gubernatorial candidates who opposed data center bans won at a higher rate than those who supported them.”
“Let’s not confuse an anti-Trump wave with an anti-tech mandate,” he added.
Sure, you could gripe that AI’s role in the election is being a overstated, given that Trump is so radioactive, and that other issues like cost of living were more in the front of voters’ minds. But it was still a driving issue, and voters made themselves heard.
Exit polls showed that a broad majority of Americans considered opposition to data centers to be a driving issue. Across 10 states, there were 41 ballot measures on placing restrictions and even outright moratoriums on AI data centers, per Ballotpedia. And in all but one of those measures, voters sided against data centers, CNBC found. (The lone outlier was a measure proposed in Harwood, North Dakota.)
That speaks enough on its own, but the biggest slap on the face to Big Tech and AI came in Texas, where a number of huge companies, many of them from California, have relocated to because of its tech friendly regulations or lack thereof — chief among them being Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX.
Roughly a quarter of the US’s planned data center capacity is in the Lone Star state, and the likes of Musk poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the race to ensure that it would stay a Republican-led tech sanctuary.
But Texas voters overwhelmingly rejected Big Tech’s vision for their future. Gina Hinojosa beat Republican incumbent Greg Abott to be the state’s next governor. A central part of her campaign was passing an “immediate moratorium on data centers” until the state passed stronger regulations, and it helped her become Texas’s first Democratic governor in over three decades. James Talarico, similarly made history and flipped a senate seat while promising to “rein in” data centers.
If that isn’t a repudiation of Big Tech, we don’t know what is.
More on AI: Americans Just Resoundingly Rejected AI Data Centers
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