As AI data centers face local resistance, a group tied to billionaire AI investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, as well as OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna, is planning to drop millions of dollars in states—starting in Kansas, Ohio, and Wisconsin—where data center construction has become a flashpoint in the midterm elections.
Build American AI, a dark money group tied to the deep-pocketed super PAC Leading the Future, announced on Aug. 31 that it is launching a major new campaign of ads, grassroots engagement, and public education to defend data center buildout, and told Axios that it had $50 million in the bank.
Leading the Future, the AI industry-bankrolled super PAC, has spent more than $28 million through its affiliates so far this cycle on independent expenditures, backing U.S. House and Senate candidates aligned with its agenda on AI regulation. Its allied 501(c)4, Build American AI, said this week that it would launch another super PAC, Building the Future, that will back state candidates, in addition to federal ones. The planned pro-data-center campaigns come after Build American AI spent more than half a million dollars earlier this year acquiring a list of followers, Transformer News reported.
The group’s executive director is Nathan Leamer, formerly vice president of public affairs at the Republican digital firm Targeted Victory, as well as a policy advisor to former FCC Chair Ajit Pai. Leamer is also a director of the advocacy nonprofit Taxpayers Protection Alliance, which the watchdog Energy and Policy Institute has traced to the Koch political network, and his boutique consulting firm was paid over $150,000 in 2024 for consulting by a construction trade group. Build American AI applauded the Trump White House’s December 2025 executive order on AI, which echoed the lobbying aims of a16z and others by calling for a federal AI framework that would preempt state protections already on the books.
The AI industry has stakes in each of the three initial states targeted by Build American AI. In Kansas, where many data centers are in the pipeline, the issue of a potential moratorium on construction popped up in gubernatorial primaries on both sides of the aisle, as did effects on utility bills. In Ohio, data centers are trending in the toss-up Senate race between Jon Husted and Sherrod Brown, sparking worry in the Senate Republican campaign arm; Amazon, Google, and Meta have projects in the state, and OpenAI is planning a massive data center in central Ohio. In Wisconsin, where the race for governor is immersed in data center debate, OpenAI plans a $15 billion data hub in Port Washington.
The a16z- and OpenAI-tied Build American AI is not the only tech interest spending big in states to sway public opinion, as polls show three-quarters of Americans would oppose a data center being built near them.
Since 2024, the Data Center Coalition (DCC), the largest data center trade association, has been rolling out advocacy groups under the organization America Connects across eight states, with names such as Virginia Connects, Texas Connects, and Connected Georgia. The chapters run ad campaigns supporting data center construction, including “creating good-paying jobs,” and pushing back against opposition. The groups' ads in Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina have received nearly 54 million views on YouTube, according to a Sludge review, some getting millions of views in just a few months.
The DCC-backed ads say, among other things, that “across the nation, data centers are paying their own energy costs”—a claim contested by research into utility costs by the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The energy costs claim is an easy one to make, but the construction of new power plants to provide that energy is distinctly not being covered in most situations that have been brought to regulators,” said Mike Jacobs, senior energy analyst with UCS. “There are clear requirements in the agreements for transmission, from Exelon for example, that push costs to all consumers.”
