Sherrod Brown Is Running Against Data Centers. He Won't Be the Last.

Sherrod Brown wants his Senate seat back, and he has picked an unusual weapon to get it: the data center. The Ohio Democrat has spent nearly $2 million across three television ad campaigns attacking Sen. Jon Husted as "the face of data centers in Ohio," a man who "cut sweetheart tax deals" for facilities that are "gobbling up energy" while "ordinary residents watched their electricity bills explode." As far as we can tell, no major-party Senate candidate has ever put opposition to data centers at the center of a statewide campaign before.

Anyone who follows our Opposition Tracker will recognize the mechanics. County hearings, moratoriums, setback ordinances, packed public-comment sessions: data centers are running the same local gauntlet that utility-scale solar, wind, and battery storage have been running for years. But when a solar farm gets attacked, a political party shows up to defend it. Nobody in either party is showing up for the data center.

The Ohio Test Case

Brown's campaign is a live experiment in whether anti-data-center politics can win a swing state. His ads tie Husted to the utility bills Ohioans are opening right now. Husted championed data center recruitment as lieutenant governor in the late 2010s, back before the AI boom turned central Ohio into one of the industry's national hubs, and Brown intends to make voters remember it. "Big corporations treat it like a game, gobbling up energy to feed their data centers, no matter how much it raises our prices," one ad runs, calling it "the latest way they've rigged the system."

The bet is not free. Brown's attacks have opened a rift with Ohio's building-trades unions, reliable Brown allies who see data centers as years of steady construction work. That a labor Democrat is willing to cross the trades over this tells you how potent his campaign believes the anger is. Bloomberg reached the same conclusion from the other direction: soaring power costs have put Ohio Republicans on the defensive in a state they thought was locked down.

The Same Playbook Solar Faces

Strip the politics away and the local mechanics are indistinguishable from a solar fight. Counties and towns are imposing data center moratoriums with the same zoning tools they aimed at panels and turbines, and our tracker logs them side by side on the same table. The complaints rhyme too: land, water, noise, viewshed, property values, and above all the electric bill.

What's different is the speed. Data Center Watch counts roughly $64 billion in projects blocked or delayed by local opposition, including 75 projects worth about $130 billion in the first three months of 2026 alone. It took the anti-solar movement a decade to build that kind of momentum. Data centers managed it in about two years.

The backlash is reaching statehouses faster, too. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the nation's first state-level data center moratorium, a fight we covered when it was still an open question. In Virginia, the industry's world capital, Gov. Abigail Spanberger is set to sign a tax on data center energy use capped at $600 million a year. Utility-scale solar has never faced a statewide freeze in a blue state. Data centers just did.

Hated Left, Hated Right

What separates this backlash from every other siting fight we cover is that it has no partisan home. In the battles our tracker logs, opposition to renewables leans conservative and rural, and Democratic officials mostly hold the line for the projects whatever local residents think. Data centers get it from everywhere. Among local elected officials who have taken public positions against data center projects, 55% are Republicans and 45% are Democrats. Polling shows views of the industry sliding in both parties over the past six months. The drop is steeper among Democrats, but majorities of Republicans now tell pollsters they don't want the facilities either.

The two sides arrive angry for different reasons. On the right, it's the tax abatements, the farmland, the grid strain, and the spectacle of the world's richest companies collecting local subsidies. On the left, it's water, emissions, utility bills, and concentrated tech power. Washington has noticed both: the first bipartisan Senate bill aimed at data-center-driven utility hikes appeared this summer, and Axios reports that prospective 2028 Democratic candidates are quietly backing away from AI boosterism altogether. When ambitious politicians in both parties independently decide the same industry is a liability, that industry has a problem no lobbying budget fixes quickly.

Why Clean Energy Should Watch This Closely

It would be easy for clean energy advocates to enjoy the spectacle of someone else's siting fight. It would also be a mistake.

Start with the money. The data center is now the clean energy industry's biggest customer, with the four largest tech buyers holding 84 GW of clean energy under contract. That demand underwrites a meaningful share of the solar, storage, and nuclear pipeline. A politics that makes data centers radioactive puts a question mark over the revenue behind those projects.

The bigger problem is that the anger driving all of this is about electric bills, and bill anger doesn't check what kind of project is on the agenda before it packs the hearing room. The same rate increases powering Brown's ads are already being repurposed in county meetings against solar and battery projects that have nothing to do with data center load. Solar, wind, and storage at least learned siting the hard way and built playbooks for it: community benefit agreements, screening, local revenue sharing. The data center industry is speed-running the backlash without any of that muscle, and every county it loses hardens the machinery that clean energy projects will face next.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are data centers being attacked by both parties?

Because the grievances split cleanly across the spectrum. Republicans object to tax abatements, farmland loss, and grid strain; Democrats object to water use, emissions, utility bills, and big tech's market power. Local officials opposing projects split 55% Republican, 45% Democrat, and polls show majorities of both parties souring on new construction.

Are data centers really raising electricity bills?

They are a genuine driver, not the sole one. Surging data center demand has pushed up capacity prices in regions like PJM, and utilities cite it in rate filings. But transmission spending, fuel costs, and plain inflation are in the same bills. The political fact is simpler than the economic one: bills are up, data centers are visible, and campaigns like Sherrod Brown's are built on that visibility.

Where are data centers being blocked?

Roughly $64 billion in projects have been blocked or delayed by local opposition nationwide, including 75 projects worth about $130 billion stalled in the first quarter of 2026 alone. New York enacted the first state-level moratorium, and county-level restrictions appear state by state in our Opposition Tracker.

Sources: Washington Examiner and Signal Ohio (Brown ad campaigns and spending); Bloomberg (July 2026, Ohio power-cost politics); Data Center Watch (blocked-project totals); Grist / Spotlight PA (bipartisan opposition data and polling); NBC News (bipartisan Senate utility-bill legislation); Axios (2028 Democrats and AI). Facts verified August 3, 2026. Free to cite with attribution and a link. Related: Data Centers & Clean Energy hub · The Great Irony of America's Energy Siting Wars · Which states make it hardest to build?