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A year ago, politicians were competing to land data centers in their states. Now, they’re competing to rein them in.
In 2013, Katie Hobbs — now Arizona’s governor — voted as a state senator to create her state’s data-center tax exemption. In 2019, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a new incentive program specifically designed to attract the industry while Jon Husted — now Ohio’s senator — praised a new Google facility and called data centers essential to the state’s emergence as a technology hub. By 2024, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was proposing a first-of-its-kind statewide consortium that directed $275 million in state funds toward a public-private AI research institution. In 2025, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro celebrated Amazon’s planned $20 billion investment as the largest private-sector investment in Commonwealth history and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott stood beside Google to announce another $40 billion in investment and declared Texas the “epicenter of AI development.” Even as recently as July 2026, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was arguing that the state needed more data centers, part of his broader campaign to “turn the Ohio River Valley into the next Silicon Valley.”
Then, the politics changed. Facilities once receiving bipartisan support suddenly found vehement bipartisan opposition.
This past June, Hobbs signed a three-year tax incentive moratorium and Pritzker suspended new incentives. In July, Husted introduced the Ratepayer Protection Act in the U.S. Senate to “protect Americans from footing the bill for new data centers” and Hochul signed the nation’s first statewide one-year moratorium on new hyperscale centers. In August, Shapiro imposed a new data center executive order which he termed the “strictest guardrails in the nation” while Abbott froze all new data center projects pending a statewide audit and told ABC that data center companies had “dug their own grave.” And while Ramaswamy was preaching more data centers in July, he announced a proposal in August to pause construction until data centers met his new set of nonnegotiable requirements.
It’s not just these four Democrats and three Republicans. A Washington Post analysis found as recently as May 2025, politicians in both parties had more positive social media posts about data centers than negative ones. By February 2026, both parties’ posts were more negative than positive, and overwhelmingly so.
To be clear, flip-flopping isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I would hope that leaders change their minds when presented with new information, and elected representatives ought to represent the evolving opinions of their constituents. But while it’s refreshing to see the gears of American democracy turn, it also raises an important question: could politicians take this too far in the other direction?
Electric capacity, climate impact, water use, pollution, siting, and lack of transparency are all real issues with the rapid buildout of data centers. But bans and moratoriums are not the answer. North American computing capacity is already extraordinarily tight, with nearly all existing data center space on the continent in use and over 80% of the capacity under construction already reserved by customers. And while nobody knows exactly how much AI infrastructure the United States will ultimately need, advanced computing is increasingly critical to business, scientific research, and national security. If every state slams the door on data centers, that demand won’t simply disappear. Capacity would become more expensive and constrained, important projects would migrate abroad, and the United States would risk surrendering some of its technological and strategic advantage to adversaries without actually solving the environmental and social issues that prompted the backlash in the first place.
The scarcest resource facing today’s American AI industry isn’t electricity or water. It’s political capital. That’s where Pennsylvania’s approach offers the best of both worlds. With huge national fanfare, Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on August 18 requiring developers to shoulder the costs of the infrastructure they need, disclose more about their energy and water use, meet strong environmental standards, and earn the support of local communities before getting Commonwealth approval. These rules may sound strict to an AI hawk, but are actually the industry’s best-case scenario in this rapidly evolving political climate. Rather than banning data centers, Pennsylvania handed the industry and other states a roadmap to restoring public trust: pay your way, protect the environment, and earn the support of the communities you enter and the buildout can continue. Keep arriving with opaque plans, new demands on the grid, and requests for special tax treatment, and angry voters on both sides will keep pushing their leaders toward outright bans, regardless of the broader consequences.
The long-term future of data centers will depend less on how fast companies can build and more on whether communities continue allowing them to build at all. Guardrails like Pennsylvania’s are therefore not barriers to growth. They’re how we preserve the political permission to keep the AI boom alive.