On the eve of the midterm elections, data centers have become one of the most powerful local political issues in America — a convergence of economic development, technology, and community concerns that, as two veteran political strategists told insurers this week, may be deciding campaigns. With no federal regulations on the horizon, the fight over AI infrastructure is being settled state by state.
David Axelrod and Karl Rove at the APCIA annual meeting in Boston (Credits: Insurance Journal)
Data Centers Become a Midterm Election Issue
David Axelrod — former chief strategist to Barack Obama — and Karl Rove — former senior advisor to George W. Bush — weighed in on the data center boom at the annual meeting of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association in Boston. Axelrod called it a winning campaign issue because communities “feel a loss of control. They feel that this is being done to them, and not with them.” Some campaigns, he noted, may have already turned on the candidates’ data center stances — and some public officials could be ousted over positions they have taken.
Axelrod acknowledged that data centers are needed to accommodate the massive power demand artificial intelligence places on critical infrastructure, but said residents need to feel they are participating in the process rather than having projects imposed on them.
State-by-State Rules: Texas Sets the Template
Without federal oversight, Rove said, governance of data centers will happen on a state-by-state basis — and there will be winners and losers. The winners, he argued, will be the states that stay friendly to development while still protecting constituents. He called out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for putting a moratorium on data centers until developers demonstrate plans for water usage, power use and capacity sharing, local buy-in on locations, and property-tax obligations without tax incentives. “If you go around to all of the big boys in this business, they’ll say yes to every one of those,” Rove said — calling it “a huge economic driver for the states that figure that out.”
The pair also touched on AI itself — another hot-button issue unlikely to face binding federal regulation any time soon. As Insurance Journal reports, the message from both strategists was clear: everyone involved needs to be politically sensitive to why communities are resisting, because the data center debate is not going away after Election Day.
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Source: Insurance Journal — read the full story there.
