데이터센터 확장이 중간선거를 앞두고 유권자들의 분노를 촉발하고 있으며 공화당 내부를 분열시키고 있다고 The Sun이 보도했다.

The rising demand for artificial intelligence data centers has divided Republicans in this election, as voters voice concerns about the energy-hungry facilities.

Just a year ago, data centers were barely on the political radar. Now the issue has created a political wedge between Republican candidates and President Donald Trump. Trump has openly rubbed elbows with tech billionaires, hosting White House dinner parties and inviting tech elites to high-stakes foreign policy meetings. He has aggressively promoted data center expansion, framing it as a national security issue and an economic necessity in the AI race against China.

"If I were a community I would want the data centers," Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews on August 21. "It means jobs, it means income, and it means lower taxes.

"If I ran a community, if I was a mayor, or if I was a governor, I would want to have the data centers because they bring tremendous income.

"They're clean, they produce their own energy, the new ones are producing their own energy. I would want to have data centers."

A modern AI facility is an industrial-scale processing engine. Some require thousands of acres of land to accommodate their infrastructure, with a single roof spanning about 30 football fields. A full hyperscale AI campus can cover a footprint of 380 to 2,400 football fields.

Inside these structures, tens of thousands of specialized AI microchips run simultaneously, crunching trillions of calculations every second to train neural networks and generate answers in real time. The raw computing power demands staggering amounts of electricity and water. A single large AI data center uses as much energy as thousands of homes and consumes millions of gallons of water daily to cool the immense heat generated by AI chips. The other half of that energy doesn't compute a single line of code; it goes strictly to preventing the building from melting. Cooling that heat requires heavy-duty chillers, industrial cooling towers, and miles of closed-loop liquid cooling running 24/7. Millions of gallons of water evaporate every day.

Despite these environmental risks, tech elites have tried to downplay the concerns, assuring rural communities that the technology will bring billions in investment, high-paying jobs, clean energy infrastructure, and groundbreaking scientific findings. But communities are fighting back, forcing Republican candidates to backtrack on their commitments to make their states a hub for data centers. Voters across the political spectrum fear they could be crippled by a perfect storm of soaring energy bills, water depletion, and noise pollution, while Silicon Valley titans are handed cushy tax breaks.

Jon Rezendes, a resident of El Paso, where Meta announced a $1.5 billion data center project in the city's northeast, raised a number of issues he believes the colossal facilities will create for the community.

"How many cookie cutter Woody Hunt and Jordan Foster homes are going to be going around this data center?" Rezendes said at a city council meeting in June.

"How many of those people are going to get cancer from the polluted water, from the emissions, from the noise, from the effects that all these people have articulated?"

"Red or blue, if you vote against data centers we vote for you," Texan Cheryl Shadden told MS NOW.

In November 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Google announced a $40 billion investment to make the Lone Star State a major center for Google's AI and cloud data center infrastructure. Less than a year later, ahead of the midterm elections, Abbott pivoted and introduced strict statewide guidelines and guardrails that AI data centers must comply with.

In Ohio, which now ranks fourth in the country for the most data centers, Senator Jon Husted has also abandoned his support for data center expansion in the state. Husted sponsored the Senate version of the Ratepayer Protection Act, which seeks to shield local communities from rising energy costs. He is locked in a tight race with Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown.

Artie Carpenter lives down the road from the Meta hyperscale data center in New Albany, Ohio, and said the facility remains noisy and lit up past midnight.

"I feel I'm getting cheated, why don't you let people here get tax exempted," Carpenter told Fox News.

In Michigan, former Congressman Mike Rogers said that, if elected, he would make AI regulation a priority.

"AI is a real concern and we've seen where some of these algorithms have escaped out of their sandbox and done some real damage to companies," Rogers said during his October 21 debate with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. "I support the national security framework for AI, to make sure there's some oversight on how these companies are developing AI that they would have the opportunity to control, including and up to, maybe even kill switch so these things don't go rogue on you."