Kelly Ayotte Data Centers & AI Corruption & Ethics New Hampshire

Kelly Ayotte Signed a Law Freeing Off-Grid Power Companies From Utility Oversight. She Used to Sit on the Board of One. Her Old Shares Would Be Worth About $1 Million.

Kelly Ayotte now says New Hampshire should pause data centers. Last year she signed a law letting off-grid power companies that serve them skip state utility rules. She was paid $112,500 on the board of one, Bloom Energy, and held shares that would be worth about $1 million today.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 22, 2026

Kelly Ayotte Signed a Law Freeing Off-Grid Power Companies From Utility Oversight. She Used to Sit on the Board of One. Her Old Shares Would Be Worth About $1 Million. — Photo: Charles Krupa / AP, edited by The Lever

Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire's Republican governor, is running for reelection. In August she said she now supports a moratorium on data centers. "It does not make sense at all to site a data center in New Hampshire," she said.

That was a turnaround. A year earlier, she signed a law that made New Hampshire friendlier to the power companies that serve data centers. And The Lever reported this week that she used to be on the board of one of those companies, and that the stock she held in it could now be worth more than $1 million.

The law she signed

On August 1, 2025, Ayotte signed House Bill 672, "an act to allow for off-grid electricity providers in New Hampshire."

Here is what that means in plain English. A power company that doesn't connect to the public grid can now sell electricity straight to one big customer, and it is exempt from the state's public utility rules while it does. New Hampshire Public Radio reported that these providers can bypass "regulations related to pricing and renewables," and called the law "part of a larger Republican-backed effort to make the state more attractive to the cryptocurrency industry." Rep. Michael Vose, one of the law's champions, told NHPR it could let someone starting a crypto mining business connect directly with a power supplier.

The power-hungry customers that kind of deal is built for are crypto mines and data centers. The Lever says the law exempts off-grid firms from the state utility board's oversight of their projects and deals, which lets them avoid safety inspections and other scrutiny.

The company she used to help run

From 2017 to 2019, after she lost her Senate seat, Ayotte sat on the board of directors of Bloom Energy. Bloom makes fuel-cell power systems, and The Lever names it as one of the off-grid energy firms the 2025 law helps. According to The Lever, data centers are at the top of the list of industries Bloom says it serves. Even back then, a 2017 company report said Bloom was "well positioned in the data center power market."

The Lever found that:

Bloom paid Ayotte $112,500 for her time on its board.
Her last filing as a board member, in 2019, showed she held more than 4,400 shares of Bloom stock, worth about $42,000 at the time.
Bloom's stock has since soared on AI data center demand. If she still holds those shares, they are worth just over $1 million today.
Even if she sold them the day before she became governor in 2025, they would have been worth more than $108,000.

We can't tell you which of those is true. New Hampshire doesn't require its governor to disclose specific stock holdings, so voters have no way to check. The Ayotte campaign didn't respond to The Lever's questions.

Then she changed her mind

The data center boom became a political problem this year, in New Hampshire and around the country. Ayotte's Democratic opponent, Cinde Warmington, was already calling for a pause by June. In August, Ayotte said she'd support one too. She told a Rotary Club that the head of New England's grid operator had warned her a large data center would push up power prices. "I don't want them to increase," she said.

That's a fine thing to say. But the off-grid law she signed in 2025 was built to let exactly these kinds of customers get power outside the normal rules. And The Lever reports that she has taken money from data center operators this cycle.

"Kelly has personally profited from data centers, and now these very same companies are bankrolling her campaign," Warmington told The Lever.

Ayotte isn't the only Republican to discover data center worries right before an election. Stacy Garrity spent a year calling for deregulation to bring more data centers to Pennsylvania, then asked for a "pause." Mike Rogers called for a moratorium days after it came out that he holds up to $2.6 million in companies that gain from the AI build-out. And Rob Bresnahan attacks Big Data in his ads while holding up to $2 million in the companies building it.

What the record shows

In 2025, Kelly Ayotte signed a law letting off-grid power companies sell electricity to big customers like data centers outside state utility regulation. Bloom Energy, an off-grid power company that targets data centers, paid her $112,500 to sit on its board, and the shares she held would be worth about $1 million today. She doesn't have to say whether she still owns them, and her campaign won't. Now, with an election coming, she says New Hampshire should pause data centers.