Democratic governors pledge data-center pauses; Nvidia, Amazon get records-preservation letters
Democrats took control of the U.S. Congress in Tuesday’s midterms, flipping seats across the country that in previous years had seemed like given wins for Republicans, and won governorships across the country, ascending even in the reddest of states, such as Texas, according to The Guardian. The Guardian’s analysis said Democrats’ success was helped by popular anger over tech, AI and the super rich, and that life for billionaires could become much more difficult. The result places some technology leaders who had aligned with President Donald Trump under greater Democratic scrutiny, with investigations of major technology companies and pauses in some hyperscale data-center construction among the promised responses.
The Guardian’s analysis opened with a photograph from Trump’s second inauguration in Washington in January 2025: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg standing front row and side by side, with Lauren Sanchez and Sundar Pichai also in the frame. The analysis said the picture at the time symbolized “the bending of the knee by the richest men in the world to its most powerful” - “a symbiosis of the ultra-rich” - and “now looks like a hitlist for a blue Congress hellbent on making life difficult for billionaires.”
According to the analysis, Silicon Valley’s tycoons believed a Maga-sized public shift to the right would enrich them even more, and it did: their fortunes ballooned over several years while Trump seemed an everlasting kingmaker and AI’s expansion seemed unstoppable, with Musk’s fortune surpassing $1tn. In the Guardian’s account, Tuesday’s results made that all-in bet look unwisely unhedged. The paper argued that the barons’ close ties to the Trump administration had become a political liability: voters concerned about corruption expressed displeasure at what the paper described as oligarchs’ blatant attempts to create a political environment to their liking, and voting against technocrats drove people toward Democrats and away from Republicans. Anger over the AI boom, data centers and Flock surveillance cameras, along with the tech oligarchs themselves, shifted the tides, The Guardian reported.
Texas Democratic representative Greg Casar wrote: “Voters rejected Republicans in part because they were bought and paid for by AI billionaires. Democrats must hold them accountable instead of cashing their checks.” His statement linked voters’ rejection of Republicans to political spending by AI billionaires and called on Democrats to demand accountability.
Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff, who won re-election to the Senate, summed up what The Guardian called the prevailing attitude toward the tech industry in his victory speech. “The titans of Silicon Valley dig bunkers for themselves and warn that the artificial intelligence they’re creating risks human extinction,” he said. Ossoff pledged to bring “big tech to heel.”
Others were more bellicose, The Guardian wrote. Ed Markey, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, tweeted late on Tuesday: “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing.” The post echoed the congressional investigations Democrats have promised to pursue into technology companies.
Democrats have promised both congressional investigations into tech companies and moratoriums on datacenters, which The Guardian said may hamstring compute-hungry AI companies. Letters to preserve records for future investigations have already gone to Nvidia and Amazon. The Guardian wrote that tech was the villain of the midterms and that angry constituents want to see it penalized. Over the past year, the major AI firms have competed in a fierce race to buy or build massive, noisy, resource-intensive facilities full of semiconductor chips to supply their growing needs for computing power - facilities Americans hate, according to the report - and the paper said Democrats stand firmly in the way of that arms race.
The Guardian reported that Democrats took governors’ mansions across the country by promising to institute moratoriums on hyperscale datacenter construction. Gina Hinojosa of Texas, Amy Acton of Ohio and Keisha Lance Bottoms of Georgia have all pledged pauses.
The Guardian reported that Musk had the worst night of anyone but Trump on Tuesday. The world’s richest man gave $450m in support of Republican candidates, most of all to Ken Paxton in Texas, but reaped little, if any, reward: Paxton lost by a major margin. Musk remained silent for some eight hours as results poured in - each piece of news, in the paper’s telling, more disastrous for his right-wing project than the last. The Guardian reported that, in what seemed like capitulation, he deleted a Tuesday post that read: “Vote red today!”
By Wednesday morning, Musk, who also leads SpaceX, wrote: “Datacenters in space are looking pretty good right now.” The Guardian said he may not get the chance to set up his orbital computers. The paper described Musk as the billionaire most closely allied with the Trump administration and the richest man in the world, and reported that investigating his conduct with the “department of government efficiency” - which it said laid waste to the humanitarian agency USAID and wide swaths of the US government - would be an easy political target for Democrats newly in control and seeking a public spectacle. Democrats may likewise investigate or attempt to unwind the multibillion-dollar merger of SpaceX and Musk’s AI company, xAI, which makes what the Guardian called the “Nazi-friendly nudification bot” Grok. The Guardian noted that xAI also holds a $200m contract with the US military, which it suggested would be another easy opening for Democratic intervention.
Mark Zuckerberg may feel a sense of deja vu when he finds himself across the table from an inquisition, as he repeatedly did at the end of the 2010s, The Guardian wrote. The Meta CEO made what the paper called a nakedly political pivot to the right under Trump’s second term: he appeared at Mar-a-Lago to show off Meta’s camera-equipped glasses to Trump and axed the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion program as the president, in the paper’s words, “waged war on DEI.” The Guardian, which described Zuckerberg as already the most disliked man in America, said his next era will show whether he believes in anything as much as he does power, raised the question of whether his embrace of jiu-jitsu mixed martial arts was authentic or a way to ingratiate himself with manosphere podcast hosts, and suggested he might return to the liberal roots of his former public image - such as founding a pro-immigration nonprofit, as he did a decade ago. An answer to the jiu-jitsu question, the paper suggested, may come by the time Zuckerberg faces his first inquest.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, himself seen at Mar-a-Lago, appears to be in damage-control mode, according to The Guardian. The paper said his tweet on Tuesday night read like a Bernie Sanders talking point: “People should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress.” The Guardian said the post invited human-first regulation and that Altman appeared to be trying to distance himself from Trump’s free-for-all stance on AI development, and from the president’s recent efforts to rebrand AI as “superintelligence.”
The Guardian wrote that Silicon Valley’s billionaires seem unlikely to rehabilitate their public images overnight after years of pandering only to power brokers. They have little to say on the issues of the day - affordability and corruption - and the majority of Americans see them as avatars of extreme wealth inequality and cynical, pay-to-play politics, according to the analysis, which asked what a billionaire could offer a populace angry about prices.
Tuesday’s election did not specify how the promised investigations or construction pauses would be carried out. It did change which party controls Congress and a broad set of governorships, placing the technology industry’s political relationships and infrastructure plans before Democratic oversight.