AI goldrush collides with voter backlash in Georgia
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/26/ai-data-centers-georgia-midterms-00888668
AI goldrush collides with voter backlash in Georgia
Multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence hubs are beginning to scramble politics in the crucial swing state as voters worry about costs and local control.
Joe Reed, a resident of Jackson, Georgia, shows maps of proposed factories and data centers at his home on April 6, 2026. | Photos by David Walter Banks for POLITICO
FORSYTH, Georgia — A multibillion-dollar data center boom is provoking a bipartisan backlash in one of the nation’s most pivotal political battlegrounds.
Tax breaks, a stable power grid and vast tracts of undeveloped land have made Georgia a mecca for the artificial intelligence industry, with sprawling data center campuses under review or in development across rural acres and the Atlanta suburbs alike.
But public opposition to this growth is starting to bleed into local and statewide elections, including a competitive governor’s race and a Senate contest that could help decide the balance of power in Washington. Meanwhile, leading Republicans and Democrats in the state are still trying to find their footing on the issue, even as strategists and party officials on both sides of the aisle warn that it’s becoming impossible to ignore.
Voters angry about the boom say too many politicians are just failing to listen.
“I
can’t picture anybody, including me, voting for anybody who has
expressed approval of data centers or who has acted on behalf of them,”
said Joe Reed, a 68-year-old retired educator, sitting at his dining
room table overlooking a slice of quiet lakeside property on the
outskirts of Jackson. The town southeast of Atlanta is just miles from
several proposed data center sites. Reed, a political independent, now
fears his quiet spot on the lake will be disrupted.
Joe Reed, 68, and his wife moved nearly 20 years ago to a quiet lakeside property on the outskirts of Jackson, Georgia — unaware that data centers would someday come.
Greg Head, who lives across the street from a new data megasite in the northern reaches of Forsyth, said he doesn’t oppose data centers in general — but he wanted more say in local officials’ decisions to approve this project.
“I’m going to vote for the individuals here locally that are going to listen to me and listen to us,” said Head, a 49-year-old heating and air conditioning contractor who normally votes for Republicans.
In Georgia, 47 percent of voters oppose data centers being built in their community, according to an Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media poll from early March, 5 points higher than voters nationally. But neither party has broadly figured out how to talk about the issue, which pits hopes for jobs, tax revenue and economic growth against worries about power bills and water — even as a POLITICO Poll in January showed that data centers pose growing political risks.
“Georgia
is a state microcosm of what’s going on across the country, and it’s
going to be an information campaign that those of us that are in favor
of data centers are going to have to accentuate and amplify,” said John
Watson, a former Georgia Republican Party chair who now consults for the
data center industry.
This land near Rocky Creek Baptist Church is the site of a proposed data center in Forsyth, Georgia.
“There’s no disputing the fact that data centers are a hot topic,” Watson said. But he maintained that the political backlash is “absolutely reversible” — and doubted that the issue will determine who becomes Georgia’s next governor.
Other political veterans see data centers becoming an inevitable part of the state’s most important races.
“Once these campaigns really get moving pretty quickly in the next few weeks, I would be surprised if this doesn’t come up,” said Spiro Amburn, a Republican strategist and former chief of staff to two state House speakers. “At some point these candidates are going to have to articulate what their vision is for data centers and just the general business climate in Georgia.”
One of the first tests of Georgia’s data center politics played out earlier this year, when a special election to fill a state Senate seat became a proxy battle over the area’s burgeoning AI warehouse developments.
One candidate — former Forsyth Mayor Eric Wilson — lost despite having served over a decade in local office because voters associated him with the data center development planned in the city, said Monroe County Republican Party Chair Noah Harbuck, a member of Forsyth’s Planning and Zoning Commission. Steven McNeel, the eventual winner, opposed the industry’s tax breaks and called for safeguards against consumer utility rate hikes.
Wilson, now running for a state House seat, acknowledged that data centers played a role in the race but cautioned against ascribing his loss to the AI hub alone.
“A lot of people can speculate different reasons when you missed something as close as we did in the special,” he said. “Data centers were a factor, and it was discussed in the race. How much of a factor is hard to tell.”
Harbuck supports the Forsyth data project but said it’s clearly a red line for some voters.
Noah Harbuck, Monroe County Republican Party chair and member of the Forsyth Planning and Zoning Commission, stands for a portrait in Forsyth, Georgia.
“It’s just like Christians with abortion: If somebody supports abortion, you’re not gonna vote for that person,” Harbuck said. “I think the majority of people don’t care. But I think there is a lot more people that would say no to data centers than say, ‘Heck yeah.’”
‘We’ll see some bad outcomes in November’
The rest of Georgia’s election calendar includes races with outsize national implications. Among those are Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff’s bid to hold onto his seat as three Republicans seek to take him on, in a must-win battle for both parties’ hopes of controlling the Senate.
Ossoff told the chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in an April letter that his office would investigate data centers’ impacts on utility bills in Georgia. His Republican opponents have said little publicly about the data boom.
The fight is playing out even more acutely in the open governor’s race. Some Democrats are calling for pauses in development and investigations of the centers’ economic and environmental impact. Republicans, meanwhile, say local officials should be the ones making the biggest decisions. And leaders in both parties want to roll back tax incentives for the facilities’ developers.
Several
Democratic gubernatorial candidates said they’ve had to field voters’
questions about data centers at their campaign stops regularly. Former
Sen. Jason Esteves has held special events aimed at discussing their
growth, including most recently a Monday town hall in suburban Atlanta,
and has promised to abolish the tax incentives that make Georgia an
appealing destination for the industry. Geoff Duncan, a former
Republican-turned-Democrat, also wants to overhaul the incentives and
thinks communities and local leaders should have more control over where
data centers are built.
A shirt opposing new factories is seen at Reed’s home in Jackson, Georgia, on April 6, 2026.
“Every room I walk into there are at least one question about data centers and what my positioning is on it,” he told POLITICO.
The Democratic frontrunner, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, has taken a more hardline approach, suggesting in an interview with the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer that she would halt data center construction pending a review of their impact.
On the Republican side, candidates are on the whole more supportive of the projects at large, but stress that local authorities — on either the municipal or county level — should have the most control over where they are built.
Watch: The Conversation
Two Republicans — Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire Rick Jackson — have come under fire for their own ties to the hubs.
Jackson has invested in a data center in Texas, but none in Georgia. Jones has faced accusations that he pushed for policy changes that opened the door to allowing a sprawling data center
to be built in his home county — and in turn benefit his father, who
partially owns the land. Jones told POLITICO that neither he nor his
family are invested in any local data centers directly.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson, center, converses before a Banks County Republican campaign event April 8 in Homer, Georgia.
The political debate around data centers is “inescapable right now, because the voters here are extremely sophisticated. They know what questions to ask,” said Connie Di Cicco, the legislative director for Georgia Conservation Voters. “They are coming to town halls and asking questions with a level of acumen that is astounding.”
“It’s unavoidable for elected officials to not be addressing this issue. How they’re addressing it is the real question, and whether they’re addressing it in a genuine way to actually be helpful,” she added.
Nationally, Trump is trying to soothe voters’ unhappiness with data centers’ voracious energy needs by striking agreements for tech companies to pay for their own electricity supplies, a move he said would provide “some PR help” for the industry. Experts are still divided on how well that approach will work.
But elected leaders and voters in some states are rejecting the push.
Maine, another Senate battleground, was the first to pass a law banning new data centers through 2027 — an idea popularized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who are proposing a nationwide moratorium on new complexes. (Democratic Gov. Janet Mills vetoed the bill Friday.) The city council of Chandler, Arizona, and voters in a small Wisconsin city also rejected data center projects in their areas, while voters in one small town in Missouri this month voted out four council members who had approved a $6 billion data center.
In Georgia, though, state lawmakers’ efforts to suspend developers’ tax breaks, pause data center construction or otherwise respond to unhappy voters have repeatedly fallen short. Those included a GOP-led attempt this year to protect consumers from shouldering rising power costs.
Republican state Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, who sponsored that measure, has warned lawmakers that data centers will be on the ballot this year.
“Everyone should heed that advice and make sure we take care of our consumers, because if not, I think we’ll see some bad outcomes in November,” the northwest Georgia lawmaker told POLITICO.
Geography matters
Middle Georgia voters’ worries about the advent of AI megasites change across county lines.
In Jackson, about 20 miles from Monroe County’s data center developments, several of the nearly dozen residents who spoke with POLITICO expressed more concern about the influx of spring breakers stopping by on a sunny Monday afternoon to tour the area’s “Stranger Things” filming locations.
Most
had heard about the data centers — and the ensuing debates — on the
local news or in Facebook groups. But many said they did not care about
the developments, nor did they see the issue affecting their vote. Even
more said they did not know enough to share an opinion.
The Butts County Courthouse in Jackson, Georgia.
Just a few miles south, voters were more willing to signal their displeasure — both with the nearby data warehouses and with the elected officials who approved them.
Head, the Monroe County resident who is set to live across from one of these sites, runs a heating and air condition company, is an elected school board member and serves on the county’s development authority. After a busy day, he said, he relishes being surrounded by acres of untouched nature.
When Forsyth annexed land across from his home and later approved it as a data center site, Head was furious. Living outside the city’s boundaries, he is unable to vote for the officials who greenlighted the development.
“I
think the majority in this county is asking for smart, controlled
growth,” Head said. “What that means is, you bring in a data center, you
need to put it in a proper place.”
“You bring in a data center, you need to put it in a proper place,” said Monroe County resident Greg Head, who lives across the street from a new data megasite in the northern reaches of Forsyth, Georgia.
Still, he said, he would rather the site be a data center rather than a shipping warehouse or retail space, which would draw more traffic to the backroad he lives near.
Reed, who lives just 20 minutes north, said he and his neighbors have long opposed the development of data centers and shipping warehouses adjacent to their quiet streets. For years, he has staged protests at some of the proposed sites, written letters to their corporate leadership and testified at county meetings across the region. (Reed is a political independent who mounted a third-party run for state representative in 2020 over his general dissatisfaction with both parties.)
He and his wife moved to a quiet spot on the lake nearly 20 years ago, hoping it would serve as a midway point between their adult children and grandchildren in North Carolina and Florida. Had Reed known the data centers were coming, he said, maybe they would have settled elsewhere.
“If you and I would quit using ChatGPT and buying stuff from Amazon, we wouldn’t need them,” he said.
“But that’s not going away.”
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