With new hyperscale data center projects popping up across Kentucky over the past year, public meetings have been increasingly full of local residents expressing their concerns, frustration and sometimes vehement opposition about those proposals to elected officials.
Last month, many of those same Kentuckians took their frustrations to the ballot box, voting in local primary races against officials who pushed for data center projects, or for the candidates and officials who stood in their way.
The primary results may reflect polling across the country that shows the public turning dramatically against energy-guzzling data centers and the artificial intelligence services they provide, as a large bipartisan majority says they do not want such a facility in their community.
Not all anti-data center candidates were successful in Kentucky, but the issue was most salient with voters in Oldham County — the first community in the state to block a project last year.
Business owner Rob Houchens was one of the local leaders in the fight against a massive $6 billion data center project on Oldham County farmland — and now appears likely to be the county’s next top elected official.
Many Oldham County residents were outraged over the lack of transparency from the company and county officials, concerned about the potential pollution and increased utility bills that have plagued other communities neighboring data centers around the country. Houchens spoke at public meetings and filed an appeal to block the county’s approval of its permit application.
The company and county officials who supported the project said it would bring a windfall of tax revenue and jobs, but the opponents eventually won out, pushing the county fiscal court to pass a moratorium on all data center applications and causing the company to abandon the project. Houchens said that effort is what first drove him to consider running for county judge-executive.
“I felt like we were fighting against the people that were supposed to be representing us,” he said.
Houchens finished first among the four Republicans running in the primary, defeating LaGrange mayor John Black, who was backed by incumbent Judge-Executive David Voegele, and a county magistrate who also supported the data center. He faces an independent candidate in the fall, but is an odds-on favorite to win in the heavily Republican county.
“Data centers came up at every forum,” Houchens said. “Every time when the five candidates were in front of people, data centers came up. So it was definitely an issue that was on the forefront of people's minds.”
The data center issue appeared to have more ramifications down the ballot. The two Oldham County Fiscal Court magistrates who voted against the moratorium last year — and have served there for two decades — faced GOP challengers, with Brent Likins losing and Bob Dye winning by a small margin.
Magistrate Kevin Woosley — whose district included the proposed data center site and who led the moratorium effort — easily won his Republican primary with 82% of the vote. He said voters were frustrated by the lack of transparency from public officials about the project, which factored into local races across the county.
“I pushed back pretty hard on it, and I think the community respected and at least understood my positions there,” Woosley said. “And I don't know that they got that from other magistrates and the county judge, which is why we saw what we did during Election Day.”
Mayor Black declined an interview about the impact of the data center issue on his judge-executive race, but said in a text message that he was “disgusted” by the “lies” told by those in the county who organized against the data center.
“Such a shame that the idiots would cause so much wrong information and scare tactics to cause our schools and many taxing districts to suffer because of so many misinformed people spreading lies and scare tactics,” Black said.
Elected leaders who supported ordinances halting data center projects also won their races against primary challengers in Simpson and Meade counties, but such a trend did not extend to voters in Mason County, where a first-time candidate opposing a $1 billion data center proposal lost his judge-executive primary.
Data center projects that have sprung up in these and other counties may also remain an issue on the minds of voters in the general election this fall. Woosley said local candidates and officials across Kentucky would be wise to pay heed to the primary results in Oldham.
“They should listen to their constituents and don't forget who they work for, because they don't work for the developer,” Woosley said. “Developers are going to come and go, and data centers someday will be a thing of the past, and their folks are going to be there — that's who they work for.”
‘Are y'all going to be able to stop this data center?’
Simpson County Judge-Executive Mason Barnes has been one of the leading opponents of a proposed $5 billion data center in his county, pushing through a land use ordinance that was opposed by the company.
Barnes said the developer offered to give him more details on the project — whose end user is still unknown to the public — if he signed a non-disclosure agreement, which he refused to do. City officials in Franklin have been more open to the company, which sued the county in January over the ordinance.
“It seems that that's the way they come into nearly every community,” Barnes said. “They grab certain people within the local government, and kind of, so to speak, get their claws sunk into them. And then it gets brought out and it's already too late to do anything about it before you find out.”
Barnes said that Franklin city leaders recruited the challenger who ran against him in the GOP primary last month — citing their difference on the data center and a joint planning commission — but he still managed to win.
“I can tell you without hesitation the most asked question I got when I stood talking to people was 'Are y'all going to be able to stop this data center?'” Barnes said. “So I think that was a motivation.”
The Meade County Fiscal Court also unanimously passed an ordinance blocking a data center last year, with the incumbent judge-executive and county magistrates all winning their GOP primary easily in May.
This wasn’t the case downballot in Simpson County, as one anti-data center Republican incumbent only won by three votes, and another lost by 74 votes. Magistrate Marty Chandler lost to challenger Michael Gregory, whose campaign reported spending the $40,000 he lent it. According to state campaign finance records, that was the second-most spending by any fiscal court magistrate candidate in the state this year, despite Gregory only receiving 410 total votes in the tiny district.
Mason County was another place where anti-data center candidates had less success in the primary. Max Moran launched the We Are Mason County Facebook group to organize opposition to the data center proposal there, drawing inspiration from the We Are Oldham County group that led their successful fight.
Moran filed to run for office for the first time and challenge Democratic Judge-Executive Owen McNeil, who is supportive of the data center and acknowledged signing an NDA with the developer behind it. However, Moran could not make it out of the Republican primary, tying for second place and losing to Eric Bach, a candidate who largely avoided taking a public stand on the data center.
Despite his loss, Moran speculated that the data center issue drove Mason County’s atypically-high turnout rate of 31% and that most are still opposed to the project.
“I firmly believe still that more than 80% of the county is against this,” he said.
Polls show bipartisan majority turning against data centers
Recent polling shows Americans across many demographics are increasingly hostile to the idea of having a massive data center near them — if not the artificial intelligence services most are built to enable.
A new Economist/YouGov poll found 60% of respondents opposed to building a data center in their community — a majority in each party — while only 24% in support. Nearly half said new data center construction is bad for the country, with only 22% saying it is good.
Another poll by Embold Research showed not just an even larger percentage opposed to data centers, but a dramatic swing in that direction over the past seven months.
In September, 43% of respondents said they would support a nearby data center, with 42% opposed. The firm’s new poll last month now shows only 21% supporting a nearby data center, with 71% opposed — 55% of those “strongly” opposed.
The poll showed large majorities of both Democrats and Republicans opposed, including 78% of those voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 and 63% of those voting for President Donald Trump — even though he and his administration are fully supportive of AI data centers and opposed to local and state regulations of them.
Houchens said that polling reflected the fight against data centers in Oldham County.
“(We Are Oldham County) is so diverse,” Houchens said. “I mean, there are people in that group that are extremely left and extremely right. So it definitely crosses the line of political affiliation.”
That opinion is shared by Erin Petrey, who advocated for a statewide moratorium on data centers in her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in central Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District.
The underfunded Petrey finished third in the crowded primary field with 15.8% of the vote, but topped out at 20% in Mercer County — where local opposition is brewing to a new data center project.
Petrey, who also spoke against the project at a public hearing in the county, said her data center stance is why she performed best in Mercer, as residents there view it as “a real existential threat.” She said some Republicans even told her they would vote for a Democrat for the first time in the fall if she won her primary.
“It’s a nonpartisan issue,” said Petrey, who formerly worked on sustainability at Amazon Web Services, one of the largest data center companies in the world. “People feel this distrust of corporations coming in with the data centers. Everything's done kind of under the cloak of darkness, under an NDA.”
Data centers may factor into general election races this fall
Petrey now has a website where Kentucky candidates can pledge to support a statewide moratorium on data centers, reject campaign contributions from data center interests and work towards proper regulations.
The signatories include two candidates for judge-executive in Mercer County who will be on the ballot this fall to take on the incumbent. Also signing on from the county is Katrina Sexton, who won the Democratic nomination to take on incumbent GOP state Rep. Kim King in the general election. King angered some data center opponents by calling an online group there “keyboard cowboys.”
Voters in Mason County may also get another chance to weigh in on data centers this fall, as Judge-Executive McNeil faces a GOP opponent and the incumbent mayor of Maysville (who signed an NDA with the data center company) faces an anti-data center opponent.
The judge-executives of Boyd and Greenup counties had no challengers file to run against them this fall, but came out in support of a new data center project in their region a week after the primary election. Both indicated that they signed an NDA with the company, with some locals berating and heckling them on the issue at the first public hearing on the project this week.
Just after the data center announcement, Joshua Spears announced on Facebook he had filed to run as a write-in candidate against Greenup County Judge-Executive Bobby Hall, citing the secrecy of the massive project.
“For too long, the big decisions in this county have been made behind closed doors, and working families have been handed the bill,” Spears wrote. “I'm running to change that.”
While Judge-Executive Barnes in Simpson County has no general election challenger, he said he expects the incumbent Franklin city officials running for reelection who supported the data center project to face the wrath of voters.
“I would venture to say that all those who voted in favor of this have no chance of serving in office again,” Barnes said.
