Tommy Tuberville has one explanation for why so many Alabama towns keep voting down data centers, and it is not their water bills.

In July he told the Alabama Sheriffs Association that his neighbors in Cullman, Bessemer, Fort Payne and elsewhere were repeating talking points from China. "They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow," he said, and called their concerns "bull crap."

On September 2, 2026, Doug Jones — the Democrat running against him for governor — pointed at Tuberville's own Senate financial disclosures and asked a question about that.

"Scare tactics about China don't acknowledge the fact that on 14 different occasions, while a United States senator, Tommy Tuberville, bought and sold stock and options in Alibaba."

Alibaba is a Chinese company. It is also one of the largest builders of AI and data centers in China.

The disclosures are not in dispute

Jones is an opponent, and opponents make claims. This one has been reported for years by outlets with no stake in an Alabama governor's race.

CNBC reported in January 2022 that Tuberville — described in the piece as a China critic — had, with his wife, bought Alibaba shares across three purchases between December 14 and December 21. Business Insider, reading the same filing, put the couple's total at between $115,000 and $250,000, and noted that his disclosures the previous June showed he held Alibaba put options as well. On January 14, 2022, three more options trades ended the Alibaba position.

Six months earlier, CNBC had reported that Tuberville violated the STOCK Act — the federal law requiring members of Congress to disclose their trades within 45 days. He was late on roughly 130 stock and options trades made between January and May of 2021, worth somewhere between $894,000 and more than $3.5 million. One of the trades he was late reporting was a sale of Alibaba put options.

His office said at the time that he had been unaware of the trades and that financial advisers made them.

That explanation is worth holding onto, because it is the same shape as the argument he is making now. When the trades look bad, he did not know about them. When Alabamians raise concerns, they are the ones being manipulated.

What Jones is actually asking

Jones raised a broader figure too: more than 250 trades disclosed in Senate financial filings, in the range of $5 million to $14 million, involving companies tied to artificial intelligence and data centers.

His ask follows from it. Jones has called for a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Alabama while the state writes rules, and a package of ethics changes to go with it: full transparency, a ban on nondisclosure agreements between developers and legislators, a prohibition on destroying records, and a ban on state officeholders trading stocks while in office. He asked Tuberville directly to divest from AI and data center companies.

"Alabama can build data centers, but we can do it right with appropriate guardrails," Jones said. "And Alabama can do it without a governor who trades the stock of these companies."

What Tuberville said back

His campaign declined to answer Jones directly. It pointed instead to an opinion piece Tuberville published the day before, in which he laid out a data center plan: local communities get the final say, developers cover the full cost of the energy and water they use, they replace what they consume, and they are taxed at the highest property tax rate.

That is a more accommodating position than "bull crap," and the shift is itself the story. Two months ago the people asking for exactly those guardrails were dupes of the Chinese government. Now the guardrails are his platform.

What he has not done is answer the money question. He was also asked, in August, to debate Jones, and declined: "There's so much difference between us. I mean, there's no reason to get up there and argue about differences of opinion."

The money keeps arriving

Whether Tuberville personally profits is only half of it. Last month we wrote about the other half: twenty-five days after he called Alabamians' data center worries "bull crap," a data center developer gave his campaign $25,000.

Data centers are becoming a defining Alabama issue, and Jones says it is not breaking along the usual lines. "It crosses party lines. It crosses racial lines. It crosses economic lines," he said.

Alabama towns are being asked to host facilities that draw enormous amounts of power and water, in a state where residents will pay the utility bills either way. The man who wants to run that state has told them their worries are foreign propaganda, has taken money from the industry, and spent his Senate years trading the stock of the companies building it — including a Chinese one.

What the filings show

Tommy Tuberville told Alabamians that opposition to data centers in their own towns is Chinese propaganda. His Senate financial disclosures record that he and his wife bought between $115,000 and $250,000 of stock in Alibaba, a Chinese AI and data center giant, that he held put options in it, and that the position was closed out in January 2022 — and that he was late disclosing about 130 trades worth between $894,000 and more than $3.5 million, one of them an Alibaba options sale, in violation of the STOCK Act. Doug Jones puts the wider total at more than 250 disclosed trades in AI and data center companies and has asked him to divest. Tuberville's campaign declined to respond and he has declined to debate.

Source

Doug Jones questions Tommy Tuberville's stock trades and data center stance — Kayla Davis, WVTM 13, September 2, 2026.