Tech giants pour $115M into politics to shape AI regulation and fast-track data centers

US tech giants open their wallets for AI-friendly politician

Rush is on to influence candidates from both parties ahead of midterms Meta is among tech giants reportedly funding US politicians friendly to the AI industry, as concerns mount over a huge expansion in datacenter building and the effects of AI on everyday life. According to The New York Times, Meta is set to spend $65 million this year backing politicians who are sympathetic to its cause. This is driven by concerns that its AI ambitions might be hampered by regulations intended to keep people safe, plus growing opposition from communities to giant data campuses popping up in their local area. Meta is starting up two new super PACs (Political Action Committees - organizations to influence election outcomes), the NYT says, which will join two others it has already formed. One group, "Forge the Future Project,", targets Republicans, while the second, "Making Our Tomorrow," focuses on Democrats. Zuckcorp isn't the only tech giant doing this, of course. The Los Angeles Times reported recently that Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman are among tech industry leaders stumping up $50 million for a new super PAC called "Leading the Future." The PAC has similar aims in ensuring AI-friendly candidates prevail in the coming mid-term elections in the US. It is perhaps a sign of the massive sums of money at stake in what many regard as an inflating AI market bubble. The frenzy of interest in AI development has led to a boom in datacenter building to feed the demand for AI processing infrastructure. This in turn has met opposition from local communities, who are worried about issues including the impact on electricity bills and water supplies. Research org Data Center Watch reports that 20 US server farm projects were blocked or delayed amid local opposition during Q2 2025. Meta alone has revealed plans to build a number of multi-gigawatt datacenter clusters, one of which would cover much of the island of Manhattan in New York City. The datacenter industry knows it has a public image problem, as discussed last year at the Datacloud Global Congress in Cannes, France. Perhaps not surprisingly, one solution touted is to get political leaders onside. In the US, the situation has got bad enough that the Trump administration has stepped in to attempt to defuse public opposition through some sort of pact between the datacenter industry and hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI, establishing principles around energy, water use and community relations. Washington is also determined to stamp out any regulations, particularly those at state level, that might constrain the AI industry. In December last year, President Trump issued an executive order intended to punish states that introduce any such legislation. While individual states want to protect citizens from the effects of algorithmic bias, data privacy breaches, and security risks that might result from AI systems, Trump has empowered Attorney General Pam Bondi to set up an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge any state regulations that potentially hinder America's race for global AI dominance. Financial analysts reported last year that the huge level of spending on AI was keeping the US economy out of recession, with datacenter infrastructure and model development providing the only significant growth. ®

Big AI Isn't Waiting for the Backlash

Meta's hard and early pivot into artificial intelligence hasn't exactly gone as planned, with tens of billions of investment dollars sunk into middling models, departmental restructurings, and clashing visions. In technical terms, the company remains an AI also-ran. In another way, though, it's emerging as an industry leader: It's spending a ton of money on politics. Regarding regulation and national law, firms like Meta are, for now, in reasonably good shape. They have an administration that's broadly deregulatory and specifically pro-AI industry and has mostly limited its threats of intervention to complaints about "wokeness" -- a problem for a company like Anthropic, perhaps, but maybe less so for ones like Meta that preemptively ponied up and fell in line. Plenty of money will be spent by the AI industry on national politics, of course (OpenAI president Greg Brockman recently became a Trump PAC megadonor), but for now, AI firms are pushing further into state and local politics and Meta is spending a lot. According to the New York Times: Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives ... Political operatives tied to A.I. interests have focused this election cycle on state capitols out of concern that states were developing a patchwork of laws that would stifle A.I. development. This, says the Times, is "the biggest election investment by Meta" so far and is focused, to start, on supporting AI-friendly Republicans in Texas and Democrats in Illinois. Meta isn't alone here: A fleet of new PACs backed by other AI firms is funneling money into local and state elections across the country. What are these companies lobbying for, exactly? Their needs fit imperfectly into two categories. First, they want to fend off direct regulation of how AI products are built, used, and deployed. That includes avoiding "transparency" laws that often include risk audits, whistleblower protections, and frameworks for ensuring AI "safety," in both the catastrophic and child-safety senses of the word. In this fight, AI firms have a useful ally in the federal government, which has been actively pressuring state lawmakers to drop the issue, most recently in Utah. Closer to the ground and a bit further from the national political discourse, for now, is the matter of data centers. Much of the money AI companies spend on AI -- raised from investors, their own balance sheets, and, more recently, bond sales -- goes into buying GPUs and leasing or building structures in which to put them. These structures then need huge amounts of power coming from either the grid or newly constructed generators of one type or another (if you're xAI, this means standing up gas turbines without permits; if you're Meta, this may look like partnering directly with a nuclear power plant). In addition to the staggering power needs, data centers use a lot of water. And despite their eye-popping costs to build and run, they barely create any jobs. For the sorts of communities being approached with these projects -- places that may be persuaded to accept the mixed prospect of hosting an Amazon warehouse or, say, a massive new ICE detention center -- AI data centers are uniquely unappealing. As a result, they encounter local resistance from across the political spectrum. According to the Financial Times: Over the past year, the White House has courted tech billionaires and gone out of its way to protect the AI industry's agenda, fast-tracking permits for data centre construction and approving the sales of advanced chips to China while cracking down on states' attempts to regulate chatbots ... But across the US, citizens, clergy and elected officials in conservative communities are leading a grassroots rebellion against the rapid rollout of the technology. Data centers offer an almost perfectly sympathetic NIMBY cause. They're a drain on local resources, straining infrastructure and driving up utility prices. They exist to support a technology about which people are fairly pessimistic across the political spectrum. They're pitched as investments in an exciting future, but that future will unfold elsewhere while your town, now designated as an infrastructural non-place, is just stuck with a big jobless box that uses more power and water than everyone else combined. The surge in local lobbying isn't about winning this argument -- good luck with that! -- so much as it's about getting as much done as possible while the companies still can, buying support at the state level and breaking ground in as many municipalities as possible before data-center backlash becomes a universal condition of local politics in America. AI firms always talk about how they're in a technological race with one another or against China in which every day counts. But they're also in a race to take advantage of a brief domestic political moment during which they're relatively unencumbered and haven't yet been metabolized into American politics. At the national, state, and local levels, this may be as good as the AI industry will ever have it. And ahead of the midterms -- not to mention the prospect of 2028 -- it's lobbying like it's running out of time.