All over the country right now, ordinary people are showing up at city council meetings to ask the same three questions about the data center somebody wants to build near them.
How much of our water will it drink? What happens to our electric bill? And who decided this?
In Luther, Oklahoma, so many people came to that meeting it needed armed security and metal detectors. The town voted for a six-month moratorium. So did Oklahoma City, Edmond and Broken Arrow. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law. Oklahoma passed a law making the giant power users pay for their own infrastructure instead of putting it on everyone's rates.
That is democracy working exactly the way it's supposed to. People noticed something, went to a meeting, and got a rule written.
The industry's biggest political spender has decided to make those rules impossible.
Its main political vehicle, a super PAC called Leading the Future, raised $125 million in 2025 and opened 2026 with $70 million on hand, CNBC reported. Its funders are Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and the AI company Perplexity. Its stated purpose is backing candidates "who support national AI regulations rather than state-by-state rules."
Strip the phrasing out and that means: one set of rules, written in Washington, that cancels the ones Luther and Edmond and Sacramento just wrote.
There is a second AI network in this election, and it wants the opposite thing. Public First Action — a nonprofit the AI company Anthropic gave a self-reported $20 million — bankrolls super PACs whose stated priorities include preserving state authority over AI rather than preempting it. It has spent millions of its own on congressional races. Both networks run their money through blandly named vehicles, and both are writing checks to Republicans. The industry is split on what the rules should say and united on paying the people who will write them.
Here are five Republicans on the receiving end of that money — or holding the stock.
Jay Obernolte wrote the bill that does the preempting
Jay Obernolte of California is the most powerful voice on AI in the House. He chairs the Science Committee's research and technology subcommittee, chaired the House AI Task Force, sits on Energy and Commerce, and is now chair of the House Republican Policy Committee.
On July 23, 2026 he introduced the FRONTIER Act. Section 9 says no state "may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers" in the covered areas — risk transparency, outside auditing, and incident reporting. There is no sunset date. As written, it is permanent.
Two of those three are things California's own SB 53 requires. The congressman from California wrote a bill that would preempt the core of the AI safety law his own state just passed.
And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture fund tapped Obernolte to launch a nonprofit called the AI Coalition, which sells early-stage AI companies — in its own words — "meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations." Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. We laid out that arrangement in full in August.
At the top of his own contributor list: employees of the AI company Anthropic, at $43,075, with Andreessen Horowitz third.
Kevin Hern got $850,000 in a race he had already won
On June 2, 2026, Leading the Future told the Washington Reporter it would spend $850,000 backing Kevin Hern in his Oklahoma Senate race.
The Reporter's own words for that race: Hern "is on a glide path to the Senate." He had Trump's endorsement, in a state where the Republican nominee wins. He did not need the money.
That is what makes it worth looking at. In a close race, money is trying to win. In a race nobody can lose, money is buying something else — and Hern will spend six years voting on exactly the question Leading the Future was formed to settle. He sits on Ways and Means, which writes the tax treatment that decides how profitable a data center is to build.
Meanwhile four Oklahoma cities were pausing data centers and Gov. Kevin Stitt was signing a law to keep the industry's power costs off residential bills. Only 1% of Hern's money comes from small grassroots donors, ranking him #434 out of 440 House members.
Carlos De La Cruz was outspent by his own backers
Carlos De La Cruz has never held office. He's an Air Force veteran running in Texas's 35th District, a seat the Legislature redrew in 2025 to make winnable for a Republican.
His campaign has raised about $1.05 million. Outside groups have spent about $2.35 million on his behalf — per the FEC's own independent expenditure records. The two biggest: $1,492,321 from an AI-industry super PAC and $615,885 from a crypto one.
The AI group is called Defending Our Values PAC — a name that tells a voter nothing. That is deliberate. The Texas Tribune found AI-linked super PACs behind at least seven Texas congressional candidates, going by "generic-sounding names" and running ads that don't mention the technology — because polling shows most voters don't want data centers near them.
But this is the industry's other side. FEC records show that almost every dollar Defending Our Values has raised this cycle — about $8.2 million — came from Public First Action, the Anthropic-backed nonprofit that wants state AI authority kept, not cancelled. De La Cruz is not being carried by the preemption campaign. He is being carried by the people fighting it — and if he wins in November, he arrives owing them just the same.
Defending Our Values also put $808,341 behind Kevin Hern, who is already getting Leading the Future's money. Both AI camps, the same Oklahoma Republican. We traced the whole $2.1 million in De La Cruz's race in August.
Julia Letlow signed a gag order with Meta, then bought Meta stock
Julia Letlow of Louisiana signed a nondisclosure agreement on June 29, 2024 with Laidley LLC — a shell company belonging to Meta. It gave her confidential details of a $50 billion data center in her own district.
The agreement barred her from even acknowledging that the agreement existed. A member of Congress signed a contract legally preventing her from telling her constituents she was discussing a $50 billion project on their land.
Then, as WWNO and the Gulf States Newsroom reported, she started buying Meta stock — and Nvidia, whose chips run Meta's data centers. She disclosed those trades on August 11, 2025, more than a month after selling her last Meta shares. In a separate report filed this January, she disclosed 210 late-filed trades from the previous two years — 100 of them, the Meta and Nvidia stock included, more than a year late, worth between $225,000 and $3.19 million. The penalty for that is $200, and it is often waived. Her office says she doesn't direct her own trades. We walked through the full record in August.
She is now her party's nominee for the U.S. Senate.
Lisa McClain's family bought into xAI a week before the Pentagon wired it into the military
Lisa McClain of Michigan is the No. 4 Republican in the House. On December 15, 2025 her husband bought between $100,001 and $250,000 of private stock in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI.
Seven days later, the Pentagon announced it was integrating xAI's Grok into its platform for military personnel. Three weeks after that it expanded the deal to classified defense networks. Musk later folded xAI into SpaceX, and when SpaceX went public in June, CNBC reported the family could be sitting on a paper gain of as much as $150,000.
There is no evidence she knew what the Pentagon was planning. What there is: a household with 1,443 trades in three years, two separate late-disclosure violations in a single year, and a seat on the Financial Services Committee. The details are here.
What it looks like where you live
None of this stays in Washington.
In southwest Missouri, hundreds of residents packed meetings to oppose a data center on the west side of Joplin, and most of the letters their city council received said no. One letter said yes. It came from their congressman, Eric Burlison, who told a forum in Carthage that "what the business is doing doesn't matter" and suggested the people asking about the water table were afraid of the unknown.
In Pennsylvania, all ten of the state's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules, while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs.
And this week, Trump's EPA moved to scrap the federal rule requiring states to tell the public when a facility applies for an air pollution permit at all — so you may not learn a data center is coming until the permit is approved or the concrete is poured.
Every one of those is the same move at a different altitude: take the decision away from the people who live there.
What the money shows
An AI super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president and Palantir's co-founder raised $125 million to elect candidates who will replace state and local AI rules with a single federal one. It committed $850,000 to Kevin Hern in a race he had already won. The industry's rival network — the one that wants states to keep their AI authority — put $1.5 million of the $2.35 million behind first-time candidate Carlos De La Cruz, more than twice what his own campaign raised, and another $808,341 behind Hern. Jay Obernolte, who wrote the bill that would permanently preempt state AI laws, helped launch a nonprofit charging AI startups up to $3,500 a month for "influence over the regulations." Julia Letlow signed a secrecy agreement with Meta and then bought Meta and Nvidia stock she disclosed over a year late, and Lisa McClain's family bought a private stake in xAI a week before the Pentagon wired its product into military systems.
