EquitiesMarket noteThursday 5 November 2026, 09:19 UTC
Data centre moratorium votes passed across the US on 3 November. Building had reached a $96.5bn annual rate, up 90% in a year; Micron fell 7% the next day.
Voters across the US approved data centre moratoriums and bans on 3 November. Data centres were on the ballot in at least 40 places in 10 states, and voters approved nearly every moratorium put to them, the Guardian reports. The votes land on a building boom: data centre construction ran at a $96.5bn annual rate in September, up 90% in a year, by Census Bureau figures. Chip shares fell the next day.
Ohio had the most. At least 14 Ohio municipalities passed bans or limits on data centre building, including Sunbury, where Amazon has proposed a project, the Guardian says. Eight towns in Maine passed temporary moratoriums. In Emporia, Kansas, where a gigawatt-scale campus on 1,000 acres was recently proposed, voters approved a ban on “high-impact” data centres. One small city in North Dakota went the other way and voted down limits on development.
Counts differ, and no official national tally exists. 404 Media counted proposals on the ballot in more than 40 races in 13 states, with voters going against data centres in 38 of them as results came in. Six cities banned data centres outright, it says, and 12 capped the power such buildings may draw, in megawatts.
Some votes were about people, not measures. In Burgin, Kentucky, a mayor who had voted for a hyperscale project lost to a write-in candidate, and in Yukon, Oklahoma, a mayor who backed one lost a recall vote, 404 Media reports.
A moratorium is a pause. A city or county stops taking or approving applications for new data centres for a set time, such as six months or a year, while it writes rules on power, water, noise and land. A ban is open-ended, and a cap limits how much electricity a site may draw. A pause on new building does not shut a data centre already running.
The biggest vote was a person’s. In Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa won the governor’s race. In July she called on Governor Greg Abbott to put a moratorium on new data centres until the state’s lawmakers deal with power and water costs. Abbott, who had made Texas a draw for AI campuses, lost by more than 700,000 votes, 404 Media says. As we reported on 4 November, what the Democrats’ win means for money includes a slower data centre buildout, a bet traders made overnight.
Data centres are now the boom inside a shrinking market. Private spending on data centre construction ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $96.5bn in September 2026, a preliminary figure, against $50.7bn in September 2025 and $56.2bn in January 2026, the Census Bureau’s monthly table shows. All private construction fell 3.8% over the same year, to $1,639bn. So data centres went from about 3% of private building to 5.9% in twelve months, by our calculation.
The pace has picked up this year: the rate rose by $40.3bn from January to September 2026, after $4.8bn from September to December 2025. In October we wrote that data centre building was up 73% in a year while the rest of US construction shrank. Since then the gap has grown.
Local votes cannot stop that spending at once. Most of the moratoriums are temporary, and the new politics do not “unwind projects already funded”, as MarketWatch puts it. What the votes change is where the next campuses go and how long they take to approve.
Shares tied to the buildout fell on Wednesday 4 November, even as the wider market rallied. Micron closed down 7.0%, Marvell 7.1%, SanDisk 7.9% and Nvidia 3.2%, and the Philadelphia semiconductor index lost 3.1%, MarketWatch reported.
Analysts read the night as a turn. The analyst Dan Ives said the results are a clear sign that the pace of the buildout will start to slow, the Guardian reports. Elon Musk, who put more than $400m behind conservative candidates, wrote on X that data centres in space looked “pretty appealing right now”.
This is analysis and opinion, not investment advice.
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EquitiesMarket noteThursday 5 November 2026, 22:29 UTC
Why did the stock market fall? The S&P 500 lost 4.4%, its worst day since April 2025, as AI chip stocks crashed after the Democrats’ sweep. SanDisk fell 22%.
The fall wiped out Wednesday’s gain, the market’s best day in three months, and more. The Nasdaq now stands 11.9% below its record of last month, which puts it in a correction, a fall of more than 10%. Nvidia, down 9.3%, was the heaviest weight on the S&P 500, AP says.
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