Michael Whatley Data Centers & AI Billionaires & Big Business North Carolina

Michael Whatley Says Data Center Opposition 'Isn't Organic' and Backs Tax Breaks for Them. Executives at a Data Center Owner Gave Him $27,000.

People at KKR — co-owner of CyrusOne, which runs a data center campus in Research Triangle Park and is building another near Sanford — gave North Carolina's Republican Senate nominee $27,000, including $5,000 from co-founder Henry Kravis. Whatley says data centers should get tax breaks but not subsidies.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 06, 2026

Michael Whatley Says Data Center Opposition 'Isn't Organic' and Backs Tax Breaks for Them. Executives at a Data Center Owner Gave Him $27,000. — Photo: Kent Nishimura / Pool Photo via AP

North Carolina is fighting about data centers — what they do to power bills, to water, to the towns that have to live next to them. Michael Whatley, the Republican running for U.S. Senate, has picked a side. He says the people pushing back are being stirred up, and he says data centers should get tax breaks.

Now we know who has been writing him checks. Cardinal & Pine reported that Whatley took $27,000 from partners, executives and investors at KKR, the giant private equity firm that co-owns the data center company CyrusOne. CyrusOne already runs a data center campus in North Carolina and is building a second one.

The money

The contributions are in Whatley's own campaign filings with the Federal Election Commission. We pulled them ourselves:

Henry Kravis, KKR's co-founder, listed as a partner: $5,000, March 16, 2026
Paul Raether, KKR partner: $5,000, March 19, 2026
James Burns, KKR executive: $5,000, March 12, 2026
Raj Agrawal, KKR investor: $5,000, March 7, 2026
Kenneth Mehlman, KKR partner: $7,000, from his own LLC, passed to the campaign through Whatley's joint fundraising committee in August 2025

That's $27,000 from people at one firm.

KKR and another investment firm, Global Infrastructure Partners, agreed in 2021 to buy CyrusOne for about $15 billion, the biggest deal the data center industry had ever seen. In North Carolina, Cardinal & Pine reports, CyrusOne runs a 420,000-square-foot campus in Research Triangle Park near the Raleigh-Durham airport, and it "is also in the process of developing a data center campus in Lee County near Sanford."

What Whatley says about data centers

In an August interview with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, Whatley brushed off the people fighting data centers in their towns: "This opposition to data centers isn't organic. This is being ginned up."

In the same interview, Spectrum News reported, he said it makes sense to have tax breaks for data centers but not subsidies.

Those tax breaks are not small. Spectrum reports that North Carolina's Commerce Department issued 37 eligibility determinations to companies seeking the state's data center tax break between 2015 and 2025, and that Governor Josh Stein has estimated the sales tax breaks could reach $450 million a year if every planned center gets built. That's money the state doesn't collect — from the same kind of company whose executives are funding Whatley.

His campaign insists his position is pro-family. "Michael Whatley's standard is simple: data centers pay their own way, families pay nothing, and communities decide," spokesman DJ Griffin told Spectrum. But a tax break is a data center not paying its own way. And "communities decide" sits awkwardly next to telling communities that their opposition "isn't organic."

The "ginned up" line is part of a wider Republican habit. We've written about the seven Republicans who blamed data center opposition on China — four of whom asked the FBI or the Justice Department to investigate who's funding it, while researchers who actually looked for a foreign campaign found little.

It's not just donations

Whatley has a personal stake in the power side of this, too. We reported earlier that he and his wife own between $163,000 and $445,000 in Duke Energy stock — the utility that has to power these data centers — while Duke has spent the past year asking to raise North Carolina's residential power rates. And before he ran, he spent years as a lobbyist at a firm that took $1.2 million from energy clients.

So when Whatley talks about data centers, he isn't a neutral referee. He is a candidate whose donors own data centers, who owns stock in the utility that powers them, and whose answer to worried neighbors is that they're being manipulated.

What the filings show

Michael Whatley's FEC reports show $27,000 from five people at KKR, the co-owner of CyrusOne, including $5,000 from co-founder Henry Kravis. CyrusOne operates a data center campus in Research Triangle Park and is developing another in Lee County. Whatley has said opposition to data centers "isn't organic" and that data centers should get tax breaks, and Cardinal & Pine reports his family also holds stock in Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet and Microsoft.