Quick pulse for Sunday, November 8. Markets are shut, so this one is about the ground the AI buildout stands on. Towns are voting against it. The labs are signing for power anyway.

Limits won 40 of 41 local votes#

On November 3, Ballotpedia tracked 41 local ballot measures on data centers. The side seeking limits won 40 of them.

Voters approved 27 restrictions, including five full bans: one in California, one in Florida, three in Ohio. They also defeated all 13 measures that would have helped data centers, among them four rezonings in Wilmington, Ohio.

The one exception was Harwood, North Dakota, a town of about 800 outside Fargo. Voters there rejected an extra review for big industrial projects. That keeps the campus Applied Digital is building for Oracle on track.

Bar chart of 41 local data center ballot measures on Nov 3 2026: 27 limits approved, 13 pro-data-center measures defeated, 1 limit rejected in Harwood, North Dakota

Is this a fringe of angry towns? The polls say no. Gallup found 71% of Americans oppose an AI data center in their area. Only 53% oppose a local nuclear plant. NBC’s exit poll put opposition at 76%.

It still wasn’t the top issue. In that exit poll, 23% called AI data centers crucial to their vote for Congress and 33% a major factor. That ranked behind corruption, cost of living, immigration enforcement and the war in Iran.

Superintelligence ran the full fact check on nine claims against data centers. Its point: until now the hard limits on AI were chips and electricity. Local consent just joined the list.

Riot leases a whole Texas campus to Anthropic#

Same week, opposite direction. Riot Platforms signed a 15-year lease for its entire Corsicana, Texas campus: 910 MW of critical IT capacity, about $28B over the initial term. That’s roughly $1.8B a year in average rent, and about $54B if both five-year extensions are used.

The press release called the tenant “a leading Frontier AI Lab.” The 10-Q filed the same day names it: Anthropic. It’s also the tenant on Riot’s 191 MW Rockdale lease. Riot now has 1,151 MW contracted for about $38B.

The fine print matters. Anthropic pays rent on all 910 MW whether it uses them or not. Riot may reimburse up to about $3.6B of the tenant’s build costs, and if it can’t finance that on market terms, it repays through rent credits at 12% a year, per CoinDesk. Power lands in three phases: 400 MW in 2027, then 200 MW and 310 MW in 2028.

InvestAnswers says he may sell his remaining MARA, CLSK and RIOT on a bounce. RIOT has beaten the other miners and Bitcoin this year. He also flags IREN as diluting shareholders more than Strategy has over two years.

Quick hits#

  • Tesla winds down the Cybertruck. Musk says Cybertruck production at Giga Texas winds down around mid-2027 to make room for more Cybercab output, per CNBC.
  • Deutsche Bank says buy SpaceX. Analyst Edison Yu kept a Buy and a $250 target on SPCX after the post-midterm drop, per CNBC. His argument: SpaceX’s big contracts sit with executive-branch agencies, not Congress.
  • Bitcoin is flat. About $75.7K this morning, about where it has sat since Thursday’s selloff.

Sources#