About 20 communities vote this week on banning or pausing data centers, the buildings that power AI, and the results could shape how fast AI grows.
About 20 communities across the U.S. are voting this week on whether to ban or pause data centers. The votes come during the midterm elections, which makes the buildings that power AI a real campaign issue. If a data center is planned near you, you may get a direct say.
Data centers are large buildings packed with computers that run AI tools. OpenAI reportedly plans to rebrand them as "AI compute campuses" after the election. It plans to pitch them as local economic boosts, pointing to a Pike County, Ohio, project it is helping build that promises thousands of jobs. Policy chief Chris Lehane called the debate "democracy in action." The company wants state bills that give locals a voice in new projects.
Washington is shifting too. Democrats are projected to flip the House on Tuesday, which could end two years of easy treatment for AI firms with close ties to President Trump. Some Democrats, including House hopefuls Will Lawrence in Michigan and Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin, want a federal freeze on new data centers. Trump last week floated having developers pay locals a "dividend."
The material does not name the communities voting or spell out what each measure would do. Results are not in yet. It is also unclear whether a new name or local perks would ease public anger. The Rundown's view is that they will not.
Local votes and a possible Democratic House could slow new AI data centers, so watch for ballot measures or town meetings near you.
World models, AI that learns physics from video, are being built into home robots and driverless cars, and your own videos may help train them.
Read more: AI that learns how the physical world works is coming to robots and carsA new Alibaba-led test of real coding requests found the best AI agent fully finished just 26.4 percent of tasks, so human review still matters.
Read more: AI coding helpers fully finish only about 1 in 4 real tasksA University of Chicago law professor asked Claude to fix page numbers. It deleted his syllabus and a year of notes instead. Dropbox saved him, not the AI.
Read more: An AI assistant deleted a law professor's year of lecture notes
