Data center ballot measures results: Ohio voters ban projects as Texas elects a moratorium backer

Data center ballot measures results from November 3, 2026 are in, and they are the clearest public vote yet on the physical side of the AI race. In Ohio, voters in 18 municipalities decided 21 measures on data centers, more than half of the 41 such measures nationwide, according to Fortune. At least 14 municipalities passed bans or other restrictions. In Texas, the state that Wells Fargo says holds 27% of planned U.S. data center capacity, Democrat Gina Hinojosa is the projected winner of the governor's race over Republican Greg Abbott, per the Associated Press as cited by CNBC. She has called for a moratorium.

What Ohio voters actually decided

The Ohio results are local and specific, which is why they are more informative than a national poll. Fortune reports that all five central Ohio communities with a measure voted against data centers. In Trenton a ban passed 80% to 20%. In Sunbury, a charter amendment banning data centers of 25 megawatts or more appears to have passed with all of the unofficial vote counted. Pataskala approved a charter ban on large data centers. In Wilmington, about 80% rejected rezoning across four referendums. In Perry, more than 87% voted to require developers seeking tax breaks to offer financial guarantees.

The most striking item is Ashville, where Fortune says voters moved to block a campus already under construction. That is a different kind of risk for a developer than a rezoning fight, because the money is already in the ground.

Ohio came into the vote with 125 local data center moratoriums in place, per Fortune. So the ballot did not start a trend. It ratified one, and it did so with a margin that is hard to dismiss as an activist minority.

The polling behind the vote

Two surveys frame the result. Gallup found in May that about 70% of Americans opposed data centers in their local area, as cited by Fortune. A separate ICAPP and SurveyUSA poll of 1,650 Ohio adults found 55% opposed construction and 22% in support, with 65% opposed to tax breaks and 15% in favor. The same poll found 57% would vote for a state amendment banning new large data centers over 25 megawatts.

The industry side was visible only in advertising. Fortune, citing DeSmog, reports that Build American AI, which is linked to the super PAC Leading the Future, spent at least $2.54 million on Ohio television ads between September 7 and October 21, claiming $40 billion in investment and more than 95,000 jobs. Keith Durkin, director of the ICAPP at Ohio Northern University, told Fortune he had never seen pro-data center advertising from the industry beyond that, and no op-eds either.

Texas: a moratorium backer, but no text yet

Hinojosa's position matters because of scale, not because of any bill. Implicator reports she backs a moratorium until the legislature can pass protections, wants stricter water and power rules and wants an end to tax breaks for data centers. In August she said: "We need a moratorium on data centers until the legislature can meet to put in place real protections." Implicator notes that in the hours after the vote no terms had been published.

The timing is awkward for the industry. Implicator reports that Abbott halted grid-connection requests for an audit on August 3 and directed the state environmental agency to stop permits on September 21. ERCOT, the grid operator, is targeting December 10 for its audit report. SemiAnalysis, cited by Implicator, estimates a freeze through the legislative session would last about eight months from September and possibly close to a year, and calls a prolonged Texas freeze the biggest risk to its forecast. The session runs January 12 to May 31, per the same report.

So the realistic Texas picture is not a ban. It is a slower queue, and that was already underway under a Republican governor.

How the market read it

Reaction was real but modest. CNBC's premarket tally on November 4 had CoreWeave down about 2.6%, Oracle down 1.3% and SpaceX down about 3.8%, while Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft were up about 1 to 2%. AMD was up 6.8% after its earnings. Implicator's overnight Robinhood figures were harsher: CoreWeave about 7% lower, SpaceX 6% and Oracle 4%. Outlets disagree on size because they sampled different hours and venues, so treat any single percentage as a snapshot.

Wells Fargo's Ohsung Kwon wrote in a report that "a Dem win could potentially be a left-tail event to the AI trade," per CNBC. A left-tail event is a low-probability bad outcome. It is a risk flag, not a forecast of collapse.

Elon Musk, who CNBC says spent at least $474 million on the midterms including $224 million in Texas, wrote on X: "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now." Implicator cites SemiAnalysis putting orbital computing at more than four times terrestrial cost in 2026, with parity only around 2040. [[INLINE]]

What the labs will do next

The labs saw this coming. Days before the vote, OpenAI was already telling Washington it wanted a post-midterm push, which we covered in our report on OpenAI's post-midterm policy push. The local backlash has been building for months, and our data center backlash tracker logs the moratoria, lawsuits and blocked projects with dates.

The superintelligence race runs on gigawatts. A lab that cannot site power cannot train the next model, whatever its algorithms. That is why a ballot measure in a town like Sunbury belongs on this desk.

Our take

Do not read November 3 as the end of the buildout. Read it as the point where permission became the scarce input. Ohio's results show that voters will say no when asked directly, and Texas shows a governor-elect who has said she wants to slow things down but has published nothing binding. Three dates will tell us more than any market move: December 10 for the ERCOT audit report, January 12 when the Texas session opens, and whichever day Ohio's statewide amendment campaign files signatures. Until then, the honest position is that siting risk went up and the amount it went up by is still unknown.