Politicians Attack Data Centers While Profiting from their Construction

62 Republicans and 43 Democrats in Congress report their households have related investments.Mother Jones illustration; Lloyd Bishop/Getty, Finn Gomez/Getty, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. During an October 15 debate debate between Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, a curiously apologetic heckler piped up. “Senator Collins, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I’m terrified,” the person shouted. “AI data centers, they’re destroying our climate, they’re poisoning our water!” “This is obviously one of Troy’s supporters,” Collins said. “Oh, shut up,” Jackson responded. “I don’t even know that kid.” The heckler was escorted out. But he had reason to target the senator: According to Forbes, Collins’ husband, Thomas Daffron, holds an estimated $300,000 to $800,000 in AI- and data center-linked investments, making their household the Senate’s fifth largest such investor. (A Collins staffer did not comment on Daffron’s holdings, but told Mother Jones she invests in index funds and has never personally traded individual stocks.) The share of America’s GDP contingent on data center buildout is now somewhere between 2 percent and 4 percent; total investment in the industry through 2032 is predicted to sit in the neighborhood of $10 trillion, per a recent Brookings Institution report. As a percentage of GDP, the AI infrastructure investment boom surpassed the size of the late-1990s dot-com bubble a year ago. So it’s no surprise that Congressional lawmakers are cashing in—collectively, US representatives and senators hold between $100 million and $300 million in data-center-related investments, according to their financial disclosures. One in five members (including 62 Republicans and 43 Democrats) report that they or others in their household are personally invested in “AI developers, chipmakers, cloud infrastructure providers, data center companies, or private AI startups,” according to a September analysis by Sludge. The top five investing households in such projects were all Democratic, including those of California Reps. Ro Khanna and Nancy Pelosi, and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. Those lawmakers are also among Congress’ 10 most active stock traders, per the watchdog group Common Cause. But members of Congress with smaller portfolios have also benefited from the boom. Often, they are lawmakers who—like Collins—have also publicly supported measures favorable to data center developers. While 76 percent of her constituents oppose further data center construction, Collins has opposed a blanket ban. She also, as The Verge has reported, utilized her position as Appropriations Committee chair to acquire $6.2 million in federal funding for a “high-performance computing hub data center” in central Maine. Other data center investors in Congress have aided the industry more explicitly. Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), was reportedly behind a clause in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act to fund the construction of data centers and accompanying small nuclear reactors on military bases. As of 2025, Wittman’s financial disclosures show he owned between $100,000 and $300,000 in stocks related to the data center boom. (Wittman’s campaign website says his investments are overseen by a financial managers who make those “decisions without consulting him.”) Henrico County, in Wittman’s Virginia district, made headlines earlier this year when officials there told schools to turn off their lights to “save energy” during a scorching heat wave, at the same time the county’s 37 data centers kept operating at full capacity. Some of Congress’s data center investors have supported bills that seem counter to industry interests. Khanna introduced a so-called Data Center Bill of Rights in August that would ban them from “residential areas and within 2,500 feet of homes, schools, childcare facilities, hospitals and nursing homes.” Khanna’s wife and dependent children reportedly own between $3.4 million and $8.4 million worth of stock in AI infrastructure companies, including chipmaker Nvidia. Khanna has called the industry “extractive,” but has not discussed its place in his portfolio; he has previously stated that his wife’s assets are managed by financial advisers. The disconnect between rhetoric and financial reality extends across the aisle. “America must win the AI race, but not at the expense of hardworking families who aren’t using the electricity data centers need,” Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) declared recently. She has up to $4.6 million invested in companies like Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Broadcom. President Donald Trump, by contrast, has been fairly open about the connection between his investment portfolio and his desire for Americans to let data centers “reign.” According to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, he owns between $2.9 million and $9.5 million in stock in companies that own, operate, or provide infrastructure for data centers—a 600 percent increase in his ownership of such investments over just one year. “The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want data centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump declared in August. Meanwhile, his political network is playing both sides—as Bloomberg reported this week, Trump’s No Going Back PAC is now attacking Democratic congressional candidates over their own data center ties.