The same companies that once silenced conservatives are now meddling again in the 2026 election.
It’s the GOP’s worst nightmare.
And a leaked internal memo just revealed how AI data centers are about to hand Chuck Schumer the one victory he’s been salivating over.
The Memo Nobody Was Supposed to See
The National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a private memo to leading AI companies recently with a title that says everything: “Ohio Data Center Risk.”
The Senate GOP campaign arm warned top AI companies that toxic views of data centers are killing the party’s chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio, with the NRSC stating that Democrats have made data centers a “centerpiece” of their campaign to defeat Sen Jon Husted (R-OH) — and that it’s working.
“If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one,” the memo says. “This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.”
Internal polls show data centers are as popular as spent nuclear waste, and have more broadly become a proxy for feelings about AI. That’s not a fringe assessment. That’s coming from AI executives and top Republicans themselves.
A poll released in June by Echelon Insights found that only 27% of Americans said they would want an AI data center built in their neighborhood, with 62% opposed — making data centers even less popular than nuclear power plants, which 34% of Americans said they would welcome.
And those numbers have consequences that go well beyond Ohio.
What Big Tech Built — and Who’s Paying for It
These facilities are designed to power AI that’s transforming the American economy, but they have drawn protests from communities nationwide because they require massive amounts of electricity, can drive up utility bills, use huge amounts of water, involve enormous warehouse-like structures, and provide few jobs.
That’s the part the tech companies don’t put in their press releases.
Ohio is ranked sixth in data centers nationally, with more than 200 facilities in operation and potentially 80 new ones on the way by 2030. The state didn’t stumble into that position. Politicians recruited these projects aggressively, and now those same politicians are holding the bag when voters get their electricity statements.
Former Sen Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has spent millions of dollars on a summer ad campaign calling Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.” One ad accused him of “aggressively” recruiting AI companies. More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck, according to the memo.
Republicans say the issue is especially potent in heavily blue-collar Ohio because the state has several big data center projects in the works. Nvidia and OpenAI have announced a project in recent days. Meta, Vantage and QTS also have projects there.
Ohio is home to a massive 10-gigawatt campus in Pike County that could cost more than $500 billion. OpenAI announced it has agreed to secure 8 gigawatts of that capacity, backstopped by a $105 billion commitment from Nvidia. Ten gigawatts is roughly equivalent to the annual power consumption of 8 million US households, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the Energy Information Administration.
That’s an enormous draw on a regional grid that ordinary Ohioans — not Nvidia shareholders — depend on every month.
Reuters reported in 2026 that 77% of respondents were concerned that AI development could increase their electricity bills. That concern isn’t abstract. It’s showing up in races across the country.
Grassroots campaigns against data centers have emerged in nearly every single state in the US, with at least 75 data center projects having been blocked or delayed in the first three months of 2026 alone.
The NRSC’s Awkward Ask — and What It Reveals
“Ohio Data Center Risk” argues it’s up to AI companies to improve perceptions of data centers by explaining “who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one.”
Read that again slowly. The Senate Republicans’ campaign committee is begging Big Tech to fix its own image because elected officials can’t do it for them. That’s not a political strategy. That’s an admission that the industry’s relationship with the communities it has invaded is broken.
“Campaigns or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy,” the memo states.
Tech giants are scrambling to pull together media campaigns to try to shift opinion before it hardens locally and nationally. Whether that works before November is another question entirely.
A Fox News poll showed Brown leading Husted by 8 points. That’s a significant gap in a state President Donald Trump carried by double digits in 2024.
The memo argues that if Brown’s campaign is successful in a state that President Donald Trump won by double digits in 2024, it will send a signal that support for data centers is a losing position across the US.
But here’s the thing — the NRSC memo frames this entirely as an image problem. A PR fix. Get the companies to do better community outreach, explain the benefits, run some ads. What the memo does not seriously grapple with is the possibility that voters are responding rationally to real costs landing on real people.
Husted’s campaign has accepted about $69,750 from political action committees and employees tied to data center and utility interests, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, American Electric Power, Duke Energy and Vistra, according to federal campaign finance records through June 30. Voters in blue-collar Ohio are not blind to that kind of donor list.
Amy Natoce, a Husted campaign spokesperson, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that “Sen Husted introduced legislation requiring data center companies to pay for the power they use and return excess electricity to the grid.” The campaign further claimed Brown is a hypocrite and supports data centers himself. “Sherrod Brown’s hypocrisy is glaring. After praising data center expansion and vowing ‘to ensure that our region’s burgeoning logistics hub continues to grow,’ Brown has done an election-year about-face,” Natoce added.
That’s a fair point as far as it goes. Brown’s conversion on this issue is awfully convenient. But convenient or not, the underlying concerns about electricity costs and water consumption don’t disappear just because a politician is opportunistic about raising them.
In late May, Ohio Gov Mike DeWine announced a pause on tax exemptions for new data centers. DeWine also signed President Donald Trump’s “ratepayer protection pledge,” in which elected officials pledge to put no burden on existing customers and no higher costs on families or ratepayers, with data centers urged to pay their own utilities.
President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge has had more than 300 companies sign on since it was announced in March. It requires companies involved in building data center infrastructure to cover the entire energy costs. That’s the right instinct. Working families shouldn’t be subsidizing the power bills of trillion-dollar corporations.
But the pledge is voluntary. And the damage in Ohio is already done.
The memo argues that a Husted loss would cause long-lasting damage to AI companies in their push to build data centers nationwide to power future generations of AI. “If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio,” the party warns.
The NRSC is right that the political fallout could spread. But the lesson politicians should be drawing isn’t that the industry needs better messaging. It’s that communities deserve real protections before a company plants a server farm next to their homes, draws down their aquifer, and sends their electric bill through the roof.
Big Tech has spent years censoring conservative voices on COVID policy, the 2020 election, and January 6. These same corporations now want Republican politicians to carry their water — literally and figuratively — while ordinary Americans foot the bill for the power these facilities consume. The NRSC memo reads like a company memo from a firm that just realized its biggest client has an image problem. It’s not a governing document. It’s a plea.
“If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio,” the party warns. That warning is probably correct. And if it does expand, Republicans who want to hold working-class voters should think carefully about whose side they’re actually on — the communities getting the higher bills, or the Silicon Valley firms writing the checks.
Sources: Axios, “Exclusive: GOP warns AI companies that data centers are politically radioactive,” August 19, 2026; Daily Caller, “Unearthed Memo Shines Light On GOP’s Five-Alarm Fire In Ohio,” August 20, 2026; CNBC, “AI data center outrage is showing up everywhere from ads to elections,” August 20, 2026; The Daily Signal, “How Will Data Centers Affect Ohio’s Elections?,” August 19, 2026; The Hill, “Fervor over data centers fires up competitive Ohio Senate race”; The Hill, “Asa Hutchinson on NRSC data centers memo: ‘Alarmist’ tone ‘concerning'”