Joe Lombardo Data Centers & AI Corruption & Ethics Nevada

Joe Lombardo Declared His Support for Data Centers Three Days After an AI Investor and His Wife Gave the PAC Backing Him $1 Million. A Week Later Another Data Center Family Gave $1 Million More.

Ben and Felicia Horowitz gave Better Nevada PAC $1 million on May 11. Lombardo posted his support for data centers on May 14. On May 21 the wife of Switch's founder gave another $1 million. He wrote in June that data centers raise water use and power bills, but 'it isn't happening in Nevada.'

MAGA Report Cards · Sep 02, 2026

Joe Lombardo Declared His Support for Data Centers Three Days After an AI Investor and His Wife Gave the PAC Backing Him $1 Million. A Week Later Another Data Center Family Gave $1 Million More.

On May 14, 2026, Joe Lombardo, the Republican governor of Nevada, posted a video on X: "I support data centers because they bring jobs, investments, and economic growth to Nevada."

Three days before he posted it, a prominent artificial intelligence investor and his wife had given $1 million to the political action committee working to re-elect him.

Nevada has roughly 70 data centers running, being built, or planned. In the driest state in the country, they need the two things it has least of: water and electricity.

The eleven days

The Lever went through the campaign finance filings for Better Nevada PAC, the committee backing Lombardo's re-election. Three dates sit close together in May:

May 11 — Ben Horowitz and his wife Felicia Horowitz gave $500,000 each, for $1 million. Ben Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm better known as a16z, which has money in a long list of AI and data center companies.
May 14 — Lombardo posted his video endorsing data centers.
May 21 — Jessica Roy gave another $1 million. She is married to Rob Roy, who founded Switch, a data center company currently building facilities in Nevada. Switch has taken millions of dollars in tax abatements from the state, and Andreessen Horowitz is one of its major investors.

Two million dollars from two families invested in data centers, inside eleven days, with the governor's public endorsement wedged in the middle of it. The two donations are not even independent of each other: Horowitz's firm has money in the company Roy's husband founded.

Horowitz is a practiced political donor. He and his business partner Marc Andreessen each gave $2.5 million to Trump's 2024 campaign, and Horowitz later gave $2.5 million to Kamala Harris's.

Lombardo's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The $5 million that followed

A month later, on June 25, the same PAC received $5 million from the Republican Governors Association.

That is normally the least interesting line in a governor's finance report. Not this time. Since January 2025, the RGA has taken at least $8.5 million from people and companies invested in AI and data centers — including $3 million from Citadel founder Ken Griffin and $2.5 million from Paul Singer of Elliott Investment Management. Both firms are heavily invested in the industry.

So the money reached Lombardo through two doors. Two million came straight from the industry's families. Five million came through the party committee that the industry had also been filling.

He knows what data centers do. He says it does not happen here.

The most damning thing in the record is not a donation. It is Lombardo's own op-ed.

In June, writing in the Reno Gazette Journal, he called data centers "an opportunity to diversify Nevada's economy, strengthen our workforce and position our state as a national leader in technology and innovation for decades to come."

In the same piece he acknowledged that data centers are "known to use massive amounts of water… and raise electricity costs for surrounding communities."

Then he claimed "it isn't happening in Nevada."

Here is what was already on the record when he wrote that.

A January report from the Desert Research Institute, a science nonprofit, found data centers consumed 22 percent of all the electricity Nevada generated in 2024, and projected that could reach 35 percent by 2030. Working from the same report, The Lever calculated that Nevada's current development plans could have data centers drinking up to 16 billion gallons of water a year — about what 150,000 households use.

The report's authors put the water demand in terms a Nevadan can picture:

"Assuming the highest level of efficiency, the water needed annually for data center cooling under the projected load growth from NV Energy is more than 14,940 times the water needed for a single household, close to 17 times the water needed for an 18-hole golf course, and approximately six times the water needed for an alfalfa farm."

In May, NV Energy — the state's largest utility — issued its own report saying Nevada's future energy demand will nearly triple because of data centers.

This August, NV Energy sued Tract, a developer building two enormous facilities near Reno, alleging it is trying to push infrastructure and energy costs onto consumers, and to move the fight into a private court to avoid public scrutiny.

The utility is suing a data center developer over exactly the cost-shifting Lombardo says is not happening. Nevada has also handed the industry $340 million in state tax abatements since 2021.

"Those billionaire friends provide jobs"

Lombardo has not been subtle about who this is for.

In August he told the Latin Chamber of Commerce that data centers could be a "new gold rush," given the right guardrails. At a separate event, standing next to President Trump, he defended Trump's "billionaire friends" directly: "those billionaire friends provide jobs. And unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent."

That is the argument, said plainly. Take care of the billionaires or the state gets nothing.

Nevada's own cities are not so sure. Local governments across the state have begun issuing moratoriums on new data center construction while they work out how much power and water the things would take. That is what a government does when it does not know. Lombardo posted a video.

His Democratic opponent, Attorney General Aaron Ford, was pointed about the donations:

"Now we know why Joe Lombardo says he's 'wholeheartedly in support of data centers: He's bought and paid for by them. Taking care of his and Trump's 'billionaire friends' at Nevadans' expense is standard operating procedure from Lombardo. I'm running for Governor to pause and audit data centers' tax breaks and block them from raising our costs, because I fight for working Nevadans – not data center billionaires, like Joe Lombardo."

Ford has also sued the federal government over cuts to Nevada's already strained Colorado River allocation. Lombardo supports that lawsuit — while backing the industry that would drink 16 billion gallons a year of what is left.

This is the second time water and Lombardo's PACs have crossed paths

The committees backing Lombardo have been here before, and the subject was water then too.

We documented what happened after Nevada Gold Mines complained about the state engineer who wanted to cut its groundwater pumping: that regulator was fired a month later — the first state engineer removed since 1981 — and three months after that the company wrote a $500,000 check to Nevada Way PAC, the other committee backing Lombardo. Nevada Gold Mines has now given that PAC $1 million, more than it has given any other politician in the state — and Nevada Way PAC has passed $8.25 million of its own money into Better Nevada PAC.

The pattern is not subtle. An industry that needs Nevada's water writes very large checks to the committees backing the governor, and the governor's position lands where the industry wants it.

Lombardo is also not the only Republican whose data center enthusiasm arrived alongside the industry's money. We have tracked eight of them who spent the last year helping the build-out or taking its cash while three out of four Americans told pollsters they do not want one of these things near their home.

What the filings show

Ben and Felicia Horowitz gave $1 million to the PAC backing Joe Lombardo's re-election on May 11, 2026. Three days later Lombardo posted a video declaring his support for Nevada's data center build-out. A week after that, the wife of Switch's founder gave the same PAC another $1 million, and in June the Republican Governors Association — itself holding at least $8.5 million from AI and data center investors — gave that PAC $5 million. In an op-ed that same month Lombardo conceded data centers use massive amounts of water and raise power bills, then wrote that "it isn't happening in Nevada," while the state's own research institute had already measured them taking 22 percent of Nevada's electricity and projected 16 billion gallons of water a year. His campaign would not comment.