Regular people — teachers, cybersecurity professionals, neighborhood organizers — spent the last year blocking more than $130 billion worth of datacenter projects. Now they've figured out the next logical step: take over the governments that were rubber-stamping them in the first place. The datacenter revolt has officially become an electoral movement, and the tech industry probably should have seen this coming.
The Ban That Started a Political Career
Steven Kung did not run for office because he always wanted to be a politician. He ran because a datacenter showed up in his neighborhood and blew up his life. After four months of teach-ins and door-knocking, Kung helped make Monterey Park, just east of Los Angeles, the first US city to ban datacenter construction outright. Then he looked at the city council seat held by the incumbent who backed the project and thought: why not?
"The datacenter coming to my neighborhood turned my life upside down," Kung told The Guardian. "I saw that there's a dismantling of democracy at a local level." His campaign mailer features a red dragon tearing a datacenter apart with its tail. That is not a metaphor. That is literally the image on the mailer. The man is not hiding the ball.
Kung is not a solo act. Amy Wong, co-founder of San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, is running for city council in nearby Alhambra. The organizers who built the movement to win the ban are now trying to own the institutions that almost let the thing get built.
Fifty Candidates and Counting
The Working Families Party started recruiting datacenter activists to run for office back in December, and the numbers tell you everything about how this movement has momentum behind it. More than 50 candidates have already signed up, and Ravi Mangla, the organization's national press secretary, told The Guardian they expect that number to "double or triple" heading into next year's races.
The vast majority are first-time candidates. Farmers. Teachers. A cybersecurity professional from Arizona. People who had zero interest in running for anything until a facility that drinks water by the millions of gallons and hums through the night showed up near their kids' school. Mangla said most recruits are based in Michigan, Texas, and Indiana, states that have become de facto sacrifice zones for the AI infrastructure boom, with more coming from swing states that could decide control of Congress.
In the first three months of 2026 alone, residents managed to delay or cancel $130 billion worth of datacenter projects, according to research from Data Center Watch. A Gallup poll from March found that seven in ten Americans oppose building these facilities near where they live. Politicians who thought this was a niche NIMBY issue are learning, the hard way, that it is not.
The Viral Moment That Launched a Campaign
Jackie McGuire is a cybersecurity professional in Marana, Arizona, a community of about 60,000 people on the outskirts of Tucson. She had never once considered running for office. Then she found out her town had approved a plan to build a datacenter on 600 acres of farmland at a cost exceeding $120 billion.
Residents raised alarms about water usage, noise pollution, electricity costs, and a general sense that local officials were making enormous decisions with zero transparency. In December, a clip of McGuire testifying against the developer, Beale Infrastructure, at a public meeting went viral on Instagram. Her following surged. She watched local officials repeatedly ignore community pushback, including outright rejecting a referendum that would have let residents vote on the project. So she ran for town council in July.
She was the only member of her anti-datacenter slate to win a seat. "I got into the race pretty last minute because we needed a majority on the town council," McGuire told The Guardian. "Unfortunately, we were not able to secure that, but that doesn't mean we're dead in the water." She plans to keep pushing for a referendum requiring voter approval before any future datacenter breaks ground.
An Oregon Primary That Nobody Saw Coming
If you want a preview of how potent this issue can be, look at what happened in Oregon in July. Myrna Muñoz, an educator with no particular name recognition, unseated Janeen Sollman, the incumbent state senator, in a Democratic primary. Sollman had backed a controversial bill that would have converted more farmland into industrial development for datacenter use. The Guardian reports that Muñoz is now expected to win the general in a solidly Democratic district.
Muñoz said she didn't even realize how many datacenter projects were under development in Hillsboro, the self-described birthplace of Oregon's tech industry, until she launched her campaign in March. She found a city that had approved 17 new projects on top of more than 30 existing sites, just before scrambling to enact a moratorium in late July. Those 17 facilities, Muñoz noted, carry tax abatements that run until 2050. "They're taking away money from my children and grandchildren," she told The Guardian.
Muñoz is now backing a three-year statewide moratorium on new datacenter construction alongside four other Oregon legislators. One primary upset is an outlier. A statewide moratorium push backed by legislators is a political movement.
Why This Issue Cuts Across Every Political Line
The coalition that has built this movement is genuinely strange, in the best possible way. The Guardian describes it as environmentalists and NIMBYs, conservatives and democratic socialists, all showing up to the same public hearings to yell at the same developers. That doesn't happen often in American politics in 2026. Almost nothing makes people forget their team affiliations.
Ravi Mangla from the Working Families Party framed it plainly: "We've seen it as an issue of working people against powerful oligarchs who want to override local concerns and draw resources from communities." That framing works because it is accurate. These are not small local businesses being opposed. These are trillion-dollar tech companies and their infrastructure partners quietly acquiring land, cutting deals with local officials, and expecting communities to absorb the costs while the profits flow somewhere else entirely.
Saul Levin, program director for the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research, told The Guardian the movement has mobilized everyday people from farmers to teachers to beauty salon workers who are "irate about what's going on" in their communities. When beauty salon workers and farmers and software engineers are all showing up to the same town hall, something real is happening.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at a story like this and see a bunch of cranky NIMBYs causing trouble for progress. That is the framing the tech industry would very much like you to adopt. What you are actually looking at is something more interesting: a functional grassroots political movement built from scratch in under two years, with a cross-ideological coalition, real electoral wins, and a pipeline of first-time candidates who are angry enough to actually do the work of running for office. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, how political change gets made.
The datacenter industry made a classic mistake. They assumed that because local governments were approving their projects, the public was fine with them. They were not fine with them. They were just not yet organized. Now they are organized, they have a party apparatus recruiting and training candidates, and they are starting to win seats. The industry spent years treating community opposition as a PR problem to be managed. It is now a political problem that will require actual concessions.
The deeper story here is about what happens when people realize that the decisions wrecking their daily lives, the water bills, the noise, the electricity costs, the farmland disappearing under concrete, are being made at the local level by local officials who assumed nobody was paying attention. They were paying attention. They just needed someone to hand them a voter registration form and a candidate to vote for. The Working Families Party is doing exactly that, and fifty candidates is only the beginning.
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