This summer Ernest Popescu was set to build a data center in Nashville. Then local leaders froze new projects through December. He walked away. Now the investors who finance data centers are asking which town is next. The Journal’s Amrith Ramkumar reports the answer may come on Nov. 3. More than 40 local ballot measures and dozens of big races could put new limits on data centers.
The scale is new. Local opposition has held up or derailed dozens of projects this year, worth hundreds of billions of dollars together. Oregon just became the latest state to ban new approvals. One city there declared a state of emergency over what it stood to lose. “It’s made the investment community very skittish,” said Popescu, a former Amazon and Meta executive who runs the developer Metrobloks. President Trump has also called on the industry to make sure the facilities pay off for towns and don’t push up power prices.
The four states to watch are Texas, Ohio, Michigan and Georgia. Texas has roughly 200 planned facilities. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, already paused new approvals. His Democratic challenger, Gina Hinojosa, says she’d ban them until the legislature protects communities. Ohio has more than 20 local ballot initiatives on data-center limits. Both candidates for governor there, Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, pledge to make approvals harder. In Michigan, Republican John James wants a pause and Democrat Jocelyn Benson wants stronger guardrails. In Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms wants a pause to review power, water and tax breaks. Republican Rick Jackson defends the projects and wants the state to set clear rules first.
Why it reaches your statement
The complaints are the same everywhere. Power bills, water, and tax breaks that leave locals paying for someone else’s project. Neither party owns the issue. That matters for investors because the AI build-out is a chain. Chip buyers need buildings, buildings need turbines, transformers and cooling, and all of it needs a permit from a county board. The companies that sell the turbines and the cooling have had a great year on the promise of that pipeline. A vote in a county you’ve never heard of can move the pipeline.
Our read
This is Investments and Risk (IN04). The story doesn’t name a single company we hold, and it touches a lot of them. GE Vernova (GEV), Vertiv (VRT), Quanta (PWR), Eaton (ETN), Vistra (VST) and Constellation (CEG) are the power builders in our books, held in 9 to 30 books each. All at weight, nothing added. A moratorium doesn’t cancel demand for power. It moves projects to the next county, and it adds delay and cost. We’d rather own that risk at a size we picked on purpose than find out it’s bigger than we thought.
The one concrete thing in your plan is your electric bill, oddly enough. It’s the household line this whole fight is about. The one check this week is to pull your last three power bills and see whether the price per unit of power is climbing. That’s the local cost the ballot measures are fighting over. Then look at the builders in your statement and make sure they’re at the weight you chose. Check the roof before the storm, not during it.