Big Tech Spent Big to Protect AI. Voters Sent the Bill Back.
AI super PACs spent about US$79 million, their biggest bets lost, and voters rejected data centers in 40 of 41 local measures. Alberta is building the same thing outside Edmonton.
C-Tribe Editorial
The AI industry tried to buy itself a friendly Congress. Voters handed it the opposite. AI-aligned super PACs spent about US$79 million across 68 House and Senate seats this cycle, and most of the Republicans backed by either camp lost, according to The Next Web. On the same ballots, local voters in 10 states weighed in on 41 measures about data centers and sided against the industry in all but one, CNBC reported, citing Ballotpedia.
"The revolt against data centers was one of the top issues of the 2026 election," said Representative Greg Casar of Texas. Canada is building the same kind of data centers, and some of them are going up right outside Edmonton.
Did AI Money Buy Anything in 2026?
Less than its backers hoped. Leading the Future, the pro-industry network backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and OpenAI's Greg Brockman, launched in August 2025 with "a war chest of around $100 million," WIRED reported. It spent about US$26 million in the primaries, then pulled back to about US$10 million in the general election, mostly on safe seats, and reported zero donations in the second and third quarters.
Its biggest risky bet failed loudly. The network spent US$4.8 million backing Republican Darline Graham in South Carolina's Senate race, Semafor reported. Her Democratic opponent, Annie Andrews, nicknamed her "Data Center Darline." Graham lost with 46.5% of the vote in a state that last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1998, per WIRED.
Its earlier campaign against New York state legislator Alex Bores, who ran for Congress on an AI safety platform, backfired too. "They fully expected to bury him, put his head on a spike, and parade it around as proof that they could," said Sacha Haworth of the Tech Oversight Project. Bores lost his June primary anyway, but the fight made him a national name.
Who Won on the Other Side?
The safety camp had a better night. Guardrails Alliance went five for five in the races it targeted, and Public First Action, which WIRED describes as having significant financial backing from Anthropic, spent US$20 million in the general election, per Semafor. Among its winners was Scott Wiener, the California lawmaker behind the state's frontier AI transparency law.
"This is a crushing blow to the AI industry's anti-regulatory efforts to buy a Congress that would look the other way," said Public First Action co-founder Brad Carson. Leading the Future's spokesman Jesse Hunt said the group sees 2028 as the moment to show "who actually cares about passing a national regulatory framework on AI."
Why Did Voters Turn on Data Centers?
Power bills, mostly. The average US residential electricity price was 18.19 cents per kilowatt hour through the first eight months of 2026, up from 17.03 cents a year earlier, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The agency does not blame data centers for that increase, but candidates did, and it worked.
In a CNBC voter poll, 56% of voters said data centers were "a crucial or major factor" in their decision. Ohio alone had 21 of the 41 local measures, and Democrat Sherrod Brown won his Senate race after painting his opponent as "the face of data centers," CNBC reported. Elon Musk, who spent at least US$474 million on the election, offered a one-liner. "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now."
The industry got the message within 48 hours. OpenAI pledged to "pay the full cost of powering data centers" it owns and operates and to "stay away from using non-disclosure agreements with public officials," CNBC reported.
What Can a Democratic Congress Do About AI?
Hold hearings first. "We are going to call the AI CEOs to testify under oath, not cash their checks," Casar said, per Semafor. Representative Ted Lieu promised to "pass legislation and reasonable guardrails on AI." Semafor also noted the splits between moderate and progressive Democrats and Trump's threat to veto bills he dislikes.
The bigger fight is over who gets to make the rules. Trump signed an executive order last December calling for "a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI," which set up a Justice Department task force to challenge state AI laws, according to the White House. A Democratic Congress is far less likely to pass a law that wipes out state rules like California's and New York's.
Wall Street noticed. Fears of an AI crackdown helped send the Nasdaq down more than 5% on November 5, wiping out more than US$2 trillion in market value, NPR reported.
Is Alberta Next in the Data Center Backlash?
It may already be happening. Alberta has 20 active data centers, 149 announced and four under construction, according to data provider Aterio, as cited by The Globe and Mail. Meta is building a $13 billion campus in Sturgeon County, just outside Edmonton. Developers have asked to connect 26,849 megawatts of data center demand to the province's grid, and Technology Minister Nate Glubish faced jeers and boos at town halls in Lacombe and Redwater in August.
Ottawa is betting big on the other end of the stack. The federal government will invest up to $1.6 billion in Toronto's Cohere as the AI company's valuation rises to $35.7 billion, the Globe reported. "In the world of AI, we need to make sure that Canada has a building place at the table," AI Minister Evan Solomon said.
The midterms are a warning for both bets. Americans did not vote against AI. They voted against paying for it, through their power bills and through politicians who looked bought. Canadian builders who want public support for the next wave of data centers should learn that lesson before Alberta voters teach it to them.
