Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom on Thursday called for a temporary ban on new data centers in Mississippi.
“The reality is, the consequences of data centers in Mississippi are already here. We’re seeing it in our power bills. We’re seeing it where we live. We’re seeing it where we pray,” Colom said at a press conference.
Colom, who is challenging incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith has a list of conditions that he would want met before proceeding with any new data center construction in the state. It includes having data centers pay their own way and more transparency about the deals. He said this would give the state a chance to study the impacts of data centers and come up with regulations.
While artificial intelligence and data centers have come up in midterm elections in other states, and have already become an issue for Mississippi’s statewide elections next year, they have not been a driving issues in Mississippi’s congressional races to date. Data center development decisions have been made at the state and local levels, with Republican Gov. Tate Reeves being a leading advocate for them. A recent poll from Pew Research Center found that over half of Americans believe data centers are mostly bad for the environment.
Data centers in Mississippi have come under increasing scrutiny. In the small town of Walls, hundreds of people showed up to a planning meeting this week in opposition to rezoning for a potential data center. Since 2024, the state has seen an influx of projects, part of the historic investment building data centers nationwide to power artificial intelligence. Mississippi has seven data center projects under construction and local leaders are interested in bringing more.
A few states have passed temporary bans on data centers. New York announced a one year moratorium on data centers and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott paused new data center approvals until the state completes audits of the state’s power grid.
Colom said Hyde-Smith has not signed on to the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill designed to protect customers from paying for upgrades to the grid that data centers need.
“She refuses to provide any oversight,” Colom said, “And then last week we learned why she has refused to do it. The AI data center Super PAC is running ads on her behalf.”
Leading the Future, a super PAC funded by Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, and prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, is spending $2 million to support Hyde-Smith and three other Republican Senate candidates. The group has cautioned that too much government regulation of AI will slow down innovation and adoption, as has President Donald Trump.
“The senator’s campaign has no involvement in the outside group’s ads. Senator Hyde-Smith shares the concerns of Mississippians and wants to make sure that families come first, that local resources are protected, and that data centers are only built once those standards are met,” said Jake Monssen, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
