AI data centers are America's next political fight. Big Tech is ready

AI firms including Anthropic and OpenAI are mobilizing political groups to pour at least $150 million into elections this year

Advocacy groups and community members protest laws surrounding data centers while outside the Texas Capitol in Austin, Monday, Feb. 23, 2026. (Mikala Compton/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)

Once people in his Republican-leaning Virginia legislative district stopped shutting their doors in his face last year, Democrat John McAuliff realized he had unexpectedly landed on a hot-button issue: Voters were getting frustrated with the armada of AI data centers popping up all around them.

McAuliff, a former White House climate adviser under President Joe Biden, ended up narrowly defeating the Republican incumbent by less than two percentage points in November, and is now a member of the state's House of Delegates. He attributes his victory partly to a focus on rising utility costs from data centers across the region, notably in nearby Loudoun County. The enormous concentration of 200 power-hungry data facilities and counting outside Washington, D.C. is cementing Loudoun County's reputation as the data center capital of the world — although Texas is not far behind in claiming that title.

Democrats won control of both chambers of the Virginia legislature and the governor's office last year, a political trifecta. McAuliff now has a chance to deliver on a core campaign promise to make sure that tech companies, not his new constituents, are the ones paying up for utility cost increases. He supports legislation making its way through the legislature that would shift certain grid-connection costs from Dominion $D Energy customers to "high-load" users like data centers.

And now it's the powerful tech industry that has been regularly knocking on McAuliff's door.

"Someone in the industry, either the representatives of the actual companies or their chosen lobbyists, have been in my office probably every other day since I got here," McAuliff said in an interview. "They're a very aggressive industry, and not wholly unhelpful. Sometimes they'll offer to help contextualize something, or sometimes they'll offer to water it down. ... But they are........

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