Billionaire-backed $50M push takes data center fight to statehouses

Build American AI, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit with ties to tech investors, said Monday it is taking a roughly $50 million argument to Kansas, Ohio and Wisconsin as those states begin shaping their 2027 legislative agendas. The effort, which the group says will expand from there, includes a new super PAC, Building the Future, to support what it calls a bipartisan slate of candidates aligned with data center development, though for now the focus is on issues rather than specific candidates.

The campaign draws on a parallel political operation: Build American AI is backed by Leading the Future, a super PAC supporting artificial intelligence and data centers that counts Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and Perplexity among its supporters. Leading the Future reported $70 million on hand at the end of 2025, CNBC said in January; it opposed Alex Bores, a New York Democrat and assemblymember who pushed for a law adopting controls around AI and lost his primary narrowly, and backed Republican congressional candidate Chris Gober, who won his primary in March. The roughly $50 million, according to Axios, is meant for ads, grassroots engagement, research, earned media and public education.

The backlash this money is meant to blunt is measurable, with more than a dozen states and localities having considered or placed bans on data center development over the past year and the fight spilling into community meetings and statehouses; Adam Waitkunas, co-founder of Milldam Public Relations, told Bisnow in April the sector is still playing catch-up in the public relations race.

For private real estate, the campaign is an admission that the binding constraint on data center capital has shifted from compute to permission. Institutional allocations have already been pulling toward power and land this cycle, as this publication has covered, which makes a zoning ban a direct hit on a strategy that has been absorbing private real estate capital. A moratorium in any one of these states would not extinguish demand; it would stall development pipelines and the private capital behind them. The group’s own wording concedes the stakes — communities “have legitimate questions about energy, water, land use, and costs” and “deserve honest answers” — which is an industry asking for time. The $50 million is the price of keeping allocated capital deployable through the 2027 legislative sessions.