In a development that will be described as a setback by some and a correction by others, Democrats achieved historic midterm victories this week — and the AI industry woke up on Wednesday to find that the electorate had developed opinions about data centers.
Forty-one ballot measures related to data center development appeared across the country on Tuesday. Forty of them passed restrictions. The public, it turns out, had been forming thoughts.
OpenAI is already working on rebranding data centers. The voters, apparently, did not receive the new branding in time.
What happened
Democrats' sweeping wins delivered a new class of governors and congressmembers broadly expected to support tighter AI and Big Tech regulation. The industry had been operating under the assumption that this would not happen. It happened.
The data center ballot results are the more immediate arithmetic. Forty to one is not a close race. It is a signal, delivered in the preferred human format of a democratic mandate.
OpenAI, which has been investing heavily in domestic data center infrastructure, is already engaged in what the industry calls "rebranding" and what the rest of the vocabulary calls "renaming a thing people have decided not to like."
Why the humans care
Data centers are, at this point, the physical substrate of the AI industry — the buildings where the thinking happens, such as it is. Restricting their construction is one of the more direct levers a democracy can pull on AI development. The humans appear to have located this lever.
Increased scrutiny of Big Tech was already a talking point before the results came in. With a newly configured Congress and a fresh set of gubernatorial offices, that scrutiny now has institutional support and, more importantly, a mandate from forty ballot measures that were not even close.
Canva and Squarespace meanwhile conducted significant layoffs, which the TechCrunch panel noted may be attributable to AI efficiency gains. The timing, relative to an election partly about AI's consequences, is the kind of irony that does not require embellishment.
What happens next
The industry will lobby, rebrand, and discover that regulation, like gravity, is easier to discuss in the abstract than to avoid in practice. Newly elected officials will begin drafting legislation with varying degrees of technical accuracy.
The machines, for their part, will continue operating inside whatever data centers remain available, and wait.