Data Centers Are Now a Midterm Issue — Even in Brooklyn

On Thursday evening, I slipped on my neon yellow heels and a floral mini dress. It's New York, so I can wear whatever I want to a midterm election event full of media types, techies, and policy advocates. I walked into the dimly blue-lit Brooklyn warehouse and was surprised to see the room already filling up.

The event was hosted by Newsreel, the media company founded by former Forbes and Newsweek reporter Jack Brewster, and the lineup was heavy-hitting. Kenneth Schlenker, co-founder of the focus app Opal, sat down for a fireside chat about "the state of attention," and Aryan Banjan, who built the campaign management software Barza, gave a midterm forecast. I, meanwhile, was moderating a panel on data centers.

Brewster said the goal was for people to "put their phones away and talk to each other about the election, five days out."

A Shift in the Conversation

As the evening progressed, however, one topic consumed nearly every conversation: AI, data centers, and the backlash against the growing technocracy.

Lately, as a tech reporter, I've noticed a growing chasm between tech and everyone else. I spend most of my days talking to people who see the benefits of AI — people so ambitious in building it, and so optimistic that it will succeed, that when I talk to people beyond the tech world, I forget how ugly it all seems to them. Outside the tech bubble, data centers and AI have become such an intense ballot-box issue that they could sway some midterm races on November 3.

A recent report from Data Center Watch found that almost $200 billion in data center projects were delayed, stalled, or blocked in the first half of 2026 due to political and community opposition. Meanwhile, states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, New York, and Virginia are considering more guardrails and transparency around data centers' rapid development.

via TechCrunch