The aftershock of the political earthquake that shook the foundations of U.S. politics with the Republican Party’s crushing defeat in the midterms has hit the artificial intelligence industry. Voters have overwhelmingly decided to put the brakes on the sector’s most visible symbol: data centers.

The Democrats’ decisive victory threatens to usher in moratoriums and stricter regulations on these facilities. A growing chorus of critics accuses them of driving up electricity bills in the communities where they are built, consuming excessive amounts of water in drought-prone areas, lacking transparency in permitting processes and tax incentives, and creating other problems that have fueled NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) movements.

In Tuesday’s midterm elections, voters were not only choosing all 435 members of the House of Representatives and renewing one-third of the Senate’s 100 seats. They also voted on governors, mayors, a host of other public offices, and numerous local measures and ballot initiatives, including several aimed at restricting the development of data centers.

Of the 41 votes on data-center projects put to referendum across 10 states, only one passed, according to a Ballotpedia report. That was in Harwood, a town of just over 1,000 residents in North Dakota, where voters rejected a proposal to revisit requirements for industrial projects.

The Democrats’ victory gives them control of both chambers of Congress. The electoral shift opens a new chapter for the AI and technology industries, which now face a more challenging landscape in Washington. Technology stocks took a significant hit on Thursday in response.

Many companies in the sector invested heavily in supporting Republican candidates. Elon Musk, for example, poured away $474 million backing conservative candidates in Texas.

Opposition to data centers

Voters in California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, New Jersey, Nevada and Wisconsin delivered a strong rebuke at the ballot box to the construction of data centers in their communities. But three states have been particularly affected by the backlash against data centers, which have become a symbol of public anxiety over the rapid expansion of AI: Ohio, Texas and Virginia.

Half of the data-center proposals rejected in the midterms were in Ohio, where 21 projects failed to secure approval from local communities. The state’s new governor, Amy Acton, a physician, defeated Republican businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

Acton, who faced intense personal attacks during the campaign, supports a moratorium on new data-center developments until operators commit to covering the full cost of the public services they consume and allow workers hired to build these vast server-filled facilities to unionize.

Alongside Virginia and Texas, Ohio has become one of the industry’s main hubs. OpenAI has planned what would be the world’s largest AI data-center campus there, backed by a consortium of investment banks and Nvidia. According to CNBC, the project could ultimately exceed $500 billion in investment.

Newly elected Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio was among the most outspoken critics of data centers during the campaign. “I will always be on your side — always. I do not work for the utility companies. I do not work for data centers. I do not work for Wall Street. I work for you. I work for Ohio,” he said in his victory speech last Tuesday.

“With the continued contentiousness surrounding data centers, it is likely both legal and political action will continue in future years,” researcher Nicol Turner Lee wrote in a report for the Brookings Institution. “Organizers across the country have turned to ballot referenda, campaigns for public office, and protests designed to slow or stop data center development.”

This expert also pointed to the lack of transparency surrounding some of the agreements local governments have signed with data-center companies, concealing local or state tax exemptions, subsidies and other benefits from taxpayers.

“The widespread use of nondisclosure agreements between data center developers and local officials has fueled public opposition to data centers and encouraged suspicions of private deals benefitting insiders,” he said.

Coco Zhang, a researcher at ING Research, reflected on the impact that the Democrats’ landslide midterm victory could have on the expansion of data centers. “The data center industry is facing heightened local opposition. Recent polls suggest that around one in seven Americans is concerned about or opposes data centre development in their neighbourhoods,” she said in an ING report released Thursday.

UBS estimates that as much as 30% of the additional data-center capacity planned in the United States by 2028 could be at risk because of potential construction delays or disruptions.

Texas has become a magnet for technology companies and data centers relocating from California, attracted by lower taxes and generous incentives. The state hopes to become the world’s largest data-center market by 2030.

Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, moved the headquarters of his companies to Texas, a shift that other Silicon Valley firms have increasingly followed. But frustration over data centers, combined with growing concerns about the risks posed by AI, has fueled public discontent.

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott went so far as to block the construction of data centers in an attempt to slow the rise of his Democratic rival, Gina Hinojosa, who ultimately won the governorship.

According to Zhang, “There is likely to be tighter data centre regulation. State-level policy will be more important to watch, as action is politically and practically easier at this level. The most likely approach is targeted regulation, much of which is already emerging. This includes data center-related taxes, reduced tax incentives, environmental standards, and requirements for developers to bear relevant cost increases.”

Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agreed: “Public policy is going to reflect public opinion, and there’s been a very substantial change in public opinion just over the last year.”

But the ING Research analyst argues that federal legislation targeting these facilities may prove difficult because U.S. President Donald Trump could use his veto power to block any such measures passed by Congress.

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Abelardo de la Espriella represents the return of a hard line to restore security in Colombia. The restoration of authority was the central idea of the campaign that brought him to power, set against a backdrop of renewed violence and the failure of the total peace policy with which his predecessor, Gustavo Petro, sought to negotiate simultaneously with all armed groups. The far-right president had promised a “shock plan” for his first 90 days in office, which conclude this week.

To project the image of a hard line, De la Espriella has allowed himself to be filmed with a pistol on his hip during an operation in Santa Marta, and has walked among the body bags of fighters from armed groups killed in military strikes. He has also turned police raids against urban crime — appearing on the scene with a radio and a bulletproof vest — into a cinematic form of government communication. Those outings are part of his nascent program to fight crime in cities, dubbed Urban Security Defense Blocks (BODSU).

Ten years after the peace agreement with the FARC, which disarmed about 13,000 guerrillas, the war still burns, only now in a more fragmented phase. De la Espriella, who rejects that historic pact, inherited on August 7 a country with nearly 29,000 members of organized armed groups and at least 14 active zones of contest between illegal actors, according to estimates from the Public Forces compiled by the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP).

Three months later, the government has intensified airstrikes (there have been at least six, in which at least eight minors have died), extraditions, and the pursuit of so‑called high‑value targets, as well as militarizing both Santa Marta (in September) and Cúcuta (last week) in response to separate security crises.

De la Espriella promised during the campaign to reclaim the “lost territories” within those 90 days, but later clarified that the deadline was for launching a “shock plan” that would include the capture of “10 major heads of narco‑terrorism and organized crime.” In other words, the so‑called high‑value targets. So far, the highest-profile case has been Naín Andrés Pérez Toncel, alias “Naín” or “Bendito menor,” one of the leaders of the Sierra Nevada Self-Defense Forces (ACSN), who was killed two months ago in Riohacha, the capital of La Guajira. Although he was not the organization’s top boss, he became one of its most visible members because of his flamboyance, and that visibility made him a priority target for the government.

The president also proposed closer cooperation with the United States, including more extraditions — often publicized widely on his social media when signed — and the construction of new mega‑prisons modeled on what Nayib Bukele has done in El Salvador, projects that have yet to materialize.

“What we have seen in the first 90 days is a change in tone, alongside the will and initiative to take military action,” says Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group, who highlights the rise in extraditions as a sign of alignment between the agendas of Bogotá and Washington (De la Espriella has joined the Shield of the Americas, Donald Trump’s alliance of like‑minded leaders to fight drug trafficking). “There is a new political will regarding military operations, and that is something many officers in the Public Forces acknowledge and appreciate,” Dickinson adds. Replacing criminal governance with legitimate state governance in many territories will be the hardest part, the expert warns.

Jorge Mantilla, a conflict specialist, likewise emphasizes that the state has regained military initiative, reflected in increased operations, arrests, and clashes. He says the image of effective leadership has been conveyed. “This is a government where the narrative matters more than the data. And there you see the whole staging of the radio, the white bags, the pistol, the green military uniform,” he says. Amid tensions within Colombia’s right, he believes De la Espriella’s major political gamble is to take the “security torch” from former president Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010).

De la Espriella has also managed to reestablish regional dialogue, Mantilla notes, after a breakdown in communication between national and local authorities that had persisted until a few months ago, before he took office. “The president’s collaborative work with the governors and mayors, through various mechanisms, can create a virtuous cycle,” he predicts. There is now greater coordination.

Several important questions remain. “The first of these is how to prevent these groups or their leaders — who are currently being targeted — from being rapidly replaced, in connection with a phenomenon that this government must address but about which it has not said a single word: the issue of forced recruitment,” Mantilla notes. The shadow of the humanitarian impact also looms large, with the civilian population caught in the middle of the military offensive and terrorist attacks such as those that occurred over the weekend in the southwestern part of the country, leaving at least five people dead. Furthermore, he concludes, there is a considerable gap between striking at armed groups and actually dismantling illicit economies, as De la Espriella has promised.

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