Voters also approved 43 of 44 local ballot measures to ban or restrict data centers across the US, often with more than 70% support. The lone exception was Harwood, North Dakota, home to a 280 MW Applied Digital campus, where nearly 75% of roughly 430 voters rejected an independent review requirement for large industrial projects. In Piqua, Ohio, where 67.8% of voters backed a ban and recalled the mayor who supported Meta’s $1 billion data center plan, Meta said it will work with local officials to determine the project’s future. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal conference, Meta President Dina Powell McCormick said starting new US data center buildouts “will be very challenging” and that the company will look into building facilities overseas while expanding existing sites.

The political backlash deepened a divergence between hyperscalers and AI hardware suppliers. While Amazon, Microsoft and Google each gained more than 4% Wednesday on expectations that construction pauses could free up cash flow and curb compute competition, CoreWeave fell more than 9%. By Thursday afternoon, the tech selloff dragged the Nasdaq down 5.1% and the S&P 500 down 3%, led by double digit drops in Bloom Energy, Sandisk, Western Digital, Seagate, AMD, Vertiv, Micron, Dell, Marvell and Qualcomm, while Citrini Research called the peak in the AI infrastructure capital spending cycle and recommended shorting Nebius.