For much of the past year, the debate among AI leaders has been whether to slow the pace of artificial-intelligence development. On Tuesday, those outside of that select community finally had their say. Voters of all stripes chose to pull hard on the only lever available to them.

Building data centers in the US just became even more difficult, but perhaps as important, voters issued a challenge to the AI billionaires behind them.

Victorious Democrats must now contend with the outcome while ensuring US AI labs remain competitive on the global stage. In China, the bottleneck is in finding enough cutting-edge chips to fill its AI factories. In the US, the challenge is building enough factories to hold all of its chips. Which scarcity proves the greater handicap in the AI race remains to be seen.

Americans were compelled to the polls for many reasons, but scrutiny of data-center projects — and the rejection of tech money — was a recurring theme. As of Wednesday afternoon, of the 41 data center-related ballot measures tracked by Ballotpedia, all but one passed in favor of preventing, restricting or otherwise exerting additional controls on development.

In Texas, Elon Musk’s $224 million — part of his $474 million in spending on the midterms — ended up being more of a gift to the eventual Senate winner, James Talarico, who held it up as an example of the corrosive influence of Musk and Big Tech. The state’s next governor, Gina Hinojosa, the first Democrat to hold that position in more than three decades, promised a data-center moratorium. Data-center builders, Bloomberg News reported, are facing their........

© Bloomberg