Data centers, a once-obscure commercial real estate sector, have suddenly become a fixture of campaign ads blaring into living rooms across the United States.

With candidates from both parties attacking their opponents by framing them as supporting the data center industry, the issue could have big implications for who controls Congress and statehouses after November's midterm elections.

Before this summer, data centers rarely appeared in political advertising anywhere in the U.S., according to advertising analytics firm AdImpact. But by the start of this month, television viewers in 38 states were seeing political ads focusing, at least in part, on data centers. The ads range from high-profile races for governor and the Senate to down-ballot contests for Congress, state legislatures and local offices.

Candidates and outside groups spent $86.5M on ads mentioning data centers between July and last week — almost always in a negative context — according to AdImpact data shared with Bisnow.

The trend is accelerating: At the end of August, the issue of data centers ranked No. 43 among 73 topics appearing in campaign ads nationwide, according to AdImpact. Now, it is No. 17.

The related issues of energy and artificial intelligence are separately ranked No. 5 and No. 20 with $226M and $74M in ads, respectively. The top four topics AdImpact tracked were Donald Trump, character, crime and healthcare.

For an industry pursuing an unprecedented wave of development, this sudden prominence as a villain in the national political discourse is raising concerns that extend well beyond Election Day. Data centers are increasingly becoming a vulnerability for politicians in both parties who supported — or continue to support — the sector’s expansion.

Industry leaders worry that this could translate into a more difficult regulatory environment after the midterms, particularly as anti-data center rhetoric gains traction with voters beyond the communities most impacted by large-scale digital infrastructure development.

“Politicians have identified this issue and are exploiting it to their benefit,” said Adam Waitkunas, president and co-founder of data center PR firm Milldam Public Relations.

“They’re seeing all these folks in local communities rise up and make a lot of noise about it. It’s an issue that candidates have been able to grab onto as they try to make a name for themselves in this election. And the polling supports that.”

The rise of data centers as a centerpiece of political rhetoric has been on display in Michigan, where backers of both the Republican and Democratic candidates in the governor’s race together spent nearly $4M last month on ads accusing each other of being staunch supporters of the data center industry, according to AdImpact.

“They want to take our land, our water, and jack up our electric bills — I'm talking about data centers,” says one ad from Democratic candidate Jocelyn Benson. The 15-second spot accused her opponent, Republican John James, of buying stock in data center companies, supporting tax breaks for the sector and taking campaign contributions from its backers.

“He profits, we pay for it,” the ad says.

A PAC supporting James responded in kind, running ads claiming that Benson advocated for data center development at the expense of residents and highlighting a controversial data center project connected to her husband’s company.

“Residents steamrolled, data center built, and the Bensons could take home millions,” the commercial alleges.

Similar dynamics are playing out across the country, with data centers being wielded as a political cudgel by both parties in closely watched races in states like Georgia, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The bulk of data center-focused political advertising remains concentrated in major development hotbeds, where opposition to hyperscale campuses and concerns over grid reliability and utility costs have already made data centers a prominent policy issue for voters. In down-ballot races in places like Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District and Pennsylvania’s 6th State Senate District, where proposed megacampuses have sparked local opposition, candidates have spent more than a million dollars on advertising focused on data centers.

There is ample evidence that data centers are successfully being deployed as an issue that motivates voters in these markets.

In Ohio's Senate race between Republican incumbent Jon Husted and Democrat Sherrod Brown, the two campaigns and outside groups have spent more than $8.3M on ads seeking to tie their opponent to the state’s data center boom, according to AdImpact.

Brown-aligned ads label Husted “the face of AI data centers” and accuse him of taking industry money and supporting billions of dollars in data center tax breaks. Husted-aligned groups, meanwhile, are calling Brown a “data center homer” who favors incentives for developers.

In August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a memo to major tech and AI firms warning that Democrats were successfully making data centers the “centerpiece” of their campaign to unseat Husted in Ohio, with millions of dollars in advertising. The NRSC argued that increasingly negative public sentiment toward data centers has uniquely hurt the GOP’s chances in the Senate race in one of the sector’s fastest-growing markets.

“This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle,” the letter warned.

Yet what is setting off new alarm bells among industry leaders is that data center opposition is beginning to feature prominently in campaign rhetoric well outside the industry’s development footprint. Political ads targeting data centers are now running in states like New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine, where large-scale development remains limited.

To industry executives, that suggests that hostility to data centers increasingly extends beyond voters directly impacted by their power consumption, water use or construction. The facilities have turned into a broader political symbol that may be difficult to counter through traditional community outreach.

“This being a political issue is a huge concern for us,” said Harmol Samra, CEO of data center firm Host Digital. “We've seen large real estate issues like rent stabilization become a thing because it impacts everyone everywhere, but this is not a thing that’s impacting everyone everywhere.”

Samra believes that much of the national antipathy stems from broader anxiety about artificial intelligence. Voters worried about AI’s impact on humanity have little direct ability to influence companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, he said. But data center development provides something tangible to push back against.

“The reason this has become such a hot-topic issue is because this is the physical embodiment of AI,” Samra said. “When a leading AI company says there's a 10% chance it might just wipe the entire species out, I can’t tell them not to build it — but I can stop them if I don’t allow data centers to be built.”

Waitkunas, on the other hand, sees the spread of anti-data center rhetoric beyond industry hubs as a continuation of the sector’s struggles in communities where projects are actually being built. High-profile fights with residents — and what he sees as the industry’s failure to address community concerns proactively — have generated national headlines that portray the industry as a bad actor.

He said this is the same dynamic that has led states like Massachusetts to enact measures limiting data center development, despite having little or no such development planned or underway.

“It's following the community uprise, where we're seeing preemptive moratoria and other ways to block data centers from coming in when there's not even a development proposed,” Waitkunas said. “This is an instance where the politicians and the political climate are following the citizenry.”

The surge in data center campaign advertising also demonstrates the bipartisan nature of the backlash. Democrats invoke data centers more frequently in campaign spots, but more than 80 Republican ad campaigns have also used the issue against opponents this cycle.

Waitkunas said GOP opposition tends to be locally rooted in areas already experiencing rapid data center development, where Republican politicians are responding directly to constituent concerns. In areas with few data centers and at the national level, it has typically been Democrats talking about data centers, although there are exceptions.

The attacks from both sides of the aisle reflect the fact that state leaders in major data center markets, both Republican and Democrat, were until recently broadly supportive of data center expansion. This track record has left incumbents from both parties vulnerable as public sentiment has shifted, including Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, although both have more recently taken steps to impose new limits on the industry.

In a highly polarized electorate, data centers are proving to be one of the few issues for which there is broad bipartisan cooperation, and one of the few issues capable of making longtime partisans break rank and cross the aisle.

Cheryl Shadden, a prominent opponent of data center development in rural Hood County, Texas, is a longtime Republican who says frustration over the industry’s unchecked expansion in the state is pushing some dyed-in-the-wool conservatives to reconsider their political allegiance.

“Red or blue, if you vote against data centers, we vote for you,” Shadden said. “One of the reasons that I'm on my rant about breaking rank is you know nobody in the state above my commissioner here in this county has done jack diddly to stop this bombardment that my community has been under.”

If political attitudes toward data centers spell trouble for the industry, it also could spell trouble for the Trump administration, which is pushing for more data centers even as they become broadly unpopular.

Waitkunas said that should data centers undermine Republicans’ fortunes in the midterms, it will be a case of the same populist impulses that brought President Donald Trump to power turning around to bite him.

“He's unleashed and fueled this populism within the Republican Party that is now coming out and opposing data centers,” Waitkunas said. “It’s ironic.”