She signed an NDA with Meta's shell company in June 2024 that gave her inside details on a $50 billion data center. Within months she was buying Meta and Nvidia stock. She hid the trades for more than a year — and she was 100 late trades into a much bigger pattern.
Obernolte chairs the House subcommittee writing AI policy and wrote the bill that would bar states — including California — from imposing safety transparency, auditing or incident-reporting duties on AI developers. He also helped launch a nonprofit that charges AI startups up to $3,500 a month for access to policymakers.
Five weeks after telling a hearing that Ohioans' worries about data centers 'deserve to be taken seriously,' the chairman of the House Energy Subcommittee signed a letter asking the FBI whether foreign adversaries are behind the backlash.
Two super PACs with deliberately vague names — one funded by an Anthropic-backed nonprofit, one by Coinbase and Ripple — put more than $2.1 million behind a first-time candidate in San Antonio. Their ads never mentioned AI or crypto. His website did.
Leading the Future — funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president and Palantir's co-founder — exists to stop states and cities from writing their own AI rules. It's running ads for Hern from before his primary through November. Meanwhile Oklahoma City, Edmond, Broken Arrow and Luther are all pausing data centers.
In a June letter, Arkansas's senior senator conceded that Americans have 'valid concerns' about data centers driving up energy costs — and in the same breath asked the DOJ to open a foreign-agent investigation into the groups organizing against them.
A Democrat toured 15 Pennsylvania counties and heard about data centers more than anything else. Meanwhile 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, nine of them voted for a law that raised power bills, and Harrisburg's $2 billion tax break for data centers is still on the books.
Both of his opponents had already released platforms. Ramaswamy ran attack ads instead — until cleveland.com refused to stop asking. He has never held elected office.
Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller says Abbott's data center crackdown is 'smoke and mirrors,' that he's never gotten a meeting with the Governor in 12 years, and that other Republicans are staying quiet because they're scared of Abbott's $105 million war chest.