When it comes to the future of AI and data centers in Ohio, some people have a vision. Others can't see past November.
Ohio's next governor will decide how the state handles the data center boom, and both leading candidates have plans built to suck in the base rather than answer hard questions. Strip away the rhetoric and the substance underneath is thin — and the stakes are bigger than either campaign is willing to admit.
Look no further than Amy Acton's pledge to require data center developers to use union labor exclusively. It appeases people who pack a union hall but leaves the 90 percent who are not trade union members outside the discussion.
Union density in Ohio's construction trades sits at roughly 11 percent, according to federal labor data. The way Acton's plan actually works is to hand the opportunity to roughly 40,000 union tradespeople while leaving more than a quarter of a million nonunion Ohio construction workers to go find other projects.
Mandate all-union labor, and Ohio doesn't get an Ohio jobs boom. It gets a narrow slice of the workforce protected by political fiat, and leaves everyone else locked out — or it gets out-of-state union workers bused in to hit a target Ohio's own union ranks can't fill.
The property rights problem is worse, and nobody on the trail wants to touch it. If a farmer wants to sell his land to a data center developer, the state has no business standing in the way. That land is his. A moratorium sounds clean in a press release, but the moment it's used to block a willing landowner from selling to a willing buyer, it stops being a regulation and starts being a violation of his legal rights.
Neither Acton nor Ramaswamy has said plainly whether they'd actually go there. Voters deserve a straight answer before November, not after a farmer's already lost a buyer and developers have moved on.
None of this is make-believe. The math is the problem, not the theory. Gov. Mike DeWine already lived it: he pushed to make Ohio a national leader in the AI buildout, then watched the state's data center tax exemption balloon from a projected $142 million to nearly $1.6 billion in a single year, forcing him to suspend it while lawmakers scrambled to study what they'd already approved.
The state is now squeezed on both sides — taxpayers furious over the cost, and a citizen petition drive with out-of-state support pushing what could become the strictest data center ban in the country.
Here's a hard fact: capital is mobile. Every month Ohio spends untangling contradictory promises, other states are handing developers a clear answer — and commitments they don't try to claw back when it's politically inconvenient.
These are real questions. There are generational consequences surrounding this issue, and voters deserve more than a 15-second sound bite for Instagram. It's a political favor for the base that everyone else pays for.
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