They fought against datacenters. Now they are running for local offices

After four months of teach-ins and canvassing, Steven Kung helped Monterey Park, just east of Los Angeles, become the first US city to ban datacenter construction. Now, the organizer is running for city council – and he’s taking on an incumbent who supported the development of the sprawling facility.

“The datacenter coming to my neighborhood turned my life upside down,” said Kung. “I saw that there’s a dismantling of democracy at a local level.”

The datacenter revolt that has united the country – building coalitions between environmentalists and Nimbys, conservatives and democratic socialists – is turning a host of community organizers into political hopefuls. In an election year that’s seen first-time candidates prevail against powerful moderate Democrats, dozens of datacenter activists are gunning for offices held by people they feel have disregarded their concerns about affordability, the environment and tech overreach.

Kung sees his political bid as an extension of the datacenter resistance; imagery from his campaign – a red dragon dismantling a facility with its tail – features prominently in his election mailers. And he’s not the only organizer who fought for the historic ban now taking a stab at elected office: Amy Wong, co-founder of San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, is running for city council in nearby Alhambra.

“The datacenter fight has illustrated the power of the people to shape their environment,” Kung said.

Turning activists into candidates

Furor against AI-powered developments has continued to mount over the past year. In the first three months of 2026 alone, residents delayed or cancelled $130bn worth of projects, according to research from Data Center Watch. And seven in 10 Americans oppose construction close to where they live, according to a Gallup poll from March.

The Working Families Party has been harnessing this populist anger to win local elections. In December, the organization began recruiting local datacenter activists to run for office. More than 50 candidates have signed up and the organization expects that number to “double or triple” for next year’s races as recent victories from high-profile progressives who want to ban datacenters have injected fresh momentum into the movement, according to Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary.

The vast majority of applicants are first-time candidates who “felt moved to run because of what’s happening in their communities”, he said. Most of the recruits are based in Michigan, Texas and Indiana – states with a high density of datacenters – with many more hailing from swing states that could decide control of Congress, Mangla said.

Jackie McGuire, a cybersecurity professional in Arizona, said she had never considered representing her hometown of Marana until late last year, when she learned about its plan to build a facility on 600 acres of farmland. The cost would exceed $120bn.

Jackie McGuire. Photograph: Courtesy Jackie McGuire

In Marana, a community of about 60,000 on the outskirts of Tucson, residents sounded the alarm on the project’s water usage, noise pollution and potential impact on their electricity bills, in addition to a general lack of transparency from local government.

In December, a clip of McGuire testifying against the developer, Beale Infrastructure, at a public meeting went viral on Instagram, and her following surged. After several months of watching town officials repeatedly subvert the will of the people, including rejecting a datacenter referendum, McGuire decided to campaign for office.

In July, she ran for town council with a slate of anti-datacenter organizers. In part, because she had some name recognition, she was the only one to win a seat.

“I got into the race pretty last minute because we needed a majority on the town council,” McGuire said. “Unfortunately, we were not able to secure that, but that doesn’t mean we’re dead in the water.”

As an elected official, McGuire said she’ll continue to push for a referendum requiring voter approval of datacenter projects.

Why datacenters animate voters

Datacenters have become a galvanizing issue in the midterms, Mangla said, because they embody the unchecked growth of corporate greed while the prices of groceries and basic goods have surged.

“We’ve seen it as an issue of working people against powerful oligarchs who want to override local concerns and draw resources from communities,” he said. “It’s something we see mobilizing and animating people all around the country, especially in the midwest and south where the growth of datacenters is especially prevalent.”

Datacenter backlash was a deciding factor in an Oregon senate primary election in July, when Myrna Muñoz, an educator, upset the incumbent, Janeen Sollman, who had backed a controversial bill that would have traded more farmland for industrial development. (Muñoz is expected to prevail in the general election in a solid Democratic district.)

Muñoz, who campaigned against the facilities, said she hadn’t realized how many were under development in Hillsboro, considered the birthplace of the state’s tech industry, until she launched her campaign in March. The city approved 17 new projects, on top of more than 30 existing sites, just before the city enacted a moratorium in late July.

“These 17 centers that got through have tax abatements until 2050,” Muñoz said. “They’re taking away money from my children and grandchildren.”

Muñoz, with four other Oregon legislators, is backing a three-year, statewide moratorium on new datacenters, in addition to more regulations on current projects.

Monterey Park residents gathered at City Hall on 21 January to speak out against the construction of a datacenter. Photograph: Steven Kung

Saul Levin, the program director for the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research, said the anti-datacenter movement has mobilized everyday people from farmers to teachers to beauty salon workers who are “irate about what’s going on” in their communities. Candidates are banking on that same energy to bring voters to the polls.

“AI companies are spending the equivalent of the US military budget on software and datacenters,” Levin said. “Instead of building these facilities to house data about people, they could fund hospitals, schools.”

In Monterey Park earlier this year, Kung mobilized a largely immigrant community against a proposed datacenter through multilingual discussion, petition drives and door-knocking. No Data Center Monterey Park, the grassroots group he co-founded, secured a moratorium on new developments in just six weeks, and a permanent ban months later.

Now campaigning ahead of the November election, Kung is turning his attention to related issues, such as protecting immigrants from ICE and terminating the city’s contract with Flock cameras, the AI-powered license plate readers that have sparked privacy concerns and become another flashpoint in local communities.

“Our insurgent campaign speaks to what’s happening in the country at large,” Kung said. “We all see the need for change.”