Democratic governor candidate Amy Acton has a new plan for dealing with data centers in Ohio – and it involves making them clear a set of state regulatory hurdles before they are approved.
Acton announced Monday that any new data centers in the state must meet certain conditions regarding energy costs, union labor, transparency, environmental standards and siting. She elaborated a bit on her ideas, some of which could require changes to state law, on her campaign website.
“Costs are too high, and Ohio families and businesses need protection from data centers driving up costs. Ohio is open for business, but we are not up for sale. If you do not meet these conditions, we do not want you in Ohio,” Acton said in a statement released by her campaign.
Here’s a rundown of Acton’s plan, as well as what Vivek Ramaswamy, Acton’s opponent in the November election, and other Republicans have proposed on data centers. Of note, Acton’s plan does not clearly call for a reduction or elimination of the state’s lucrative data center tax exemption – which Republican House Speaker Matt Huffman attempted to repeal earlier this summer until talks fell apart.
Acton and Ramaswamy are running to replace Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who is term-limited.
Acton’s data center plan
Acton’s plan assigns several conditions to any data center project. They include:
- Requiring operators and their investors to pay for their own gas, water and electricity, including demonstrating their projects won’t contribute to rising electricity costs
- Ending the practice of signing nondisclosure agreements with local officials that in the past has led to residents not knowing who’s behind a project until the last minute
- Requiring the use of union workers to build, maintain and operate them. Organized labor groups have supported data centers, due to the large number of construction jobs Ohio’s data center boom has provided, making some Democrats initially reluctant to be more aggressive against them.
- Setting environmental standards for water use, air quality and “quality of life”
- Building data centers on “brownfields” – or abandoned commercial or industrial sites – instead of on farmland or other undeveloped land.
It’s unclear which parts of Acton’s plan she could do administratively, and which parts would require approval from the Republican-controlled state legislature.
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Acton plan doesn’t mention data center tax break size
Acton also describes “reining in incentives” for data centers, including allowing the state to claw back money for developers who fail to follow through on their job promises and making the process more transparent.
But it does not propose ending or reducing the state’s data center tax exemption, as some Republicans and Democrats have called for after it was revealed its price tag had exploded to $1.6 billion in 2025, more than 10 times greater than state tax officials had estimated.
In contrast, Huffman and other legislative Republicans over the summer pushed to eliminate or reduce the data center tax exemption. An eventual legislative compromise, House Bill 646, called for cutting Ohio’s lucrative tax break for data centers in half. Like Acton’s plan, the bill also called for imposing various conditions on water usage, energy cost and transparency. The bill stalled in June, though, after Republican talks fell apart over the tax exemption issue.
It also would have required data centers to cover their electricity costs, such as by requiring all data centers above a certain size to supply their own electricity, or to pay to offset the draw on the larger electrical grid.
Generally, data center companies increasingly have agreed to cover these kinds of costs as the immense infrastructure upgrades the facilities require have potentially been passed on to all ratepayers.
Of note, Acton describes her plan as a “conditional moratorium” – which seems to suggest the state’s default stance would be to ban new data centers unless they can live up to the conditions she laid out.
The Republican plan’s default stance is to allow data centers while setting rules for their construction and planning.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s thoughts on data centers
Ramaswamy, the Republican billionaire entrepreneur running for governor against Acton, hasn’t yet released an official data center plan.
But he has shared his thoughts when asked about the issue during public appearances.
In a June interview with conservative Cleveland-area radio host Bob Frantz, Ramaswamy said data center construction is part of the reindustrialization that President Donald Trump campaigned on during the 2024 election. But, he said that data center projects should avoid passing the cost of their electricity use and grid upgrades to everyday customers.
“If you use energy, you either bring your energy or you pay for the energy that you use. Period,” Ramaswamy said. If this is done right, he added, the data centers would drive down costs for other ratepayers by paying for a relatively greater share of the overall grid usage.
The other main issue, Ramaswamy said, was siting. He said developers should first consider building their projects on brownfield sites, similar to Acton’s proposal, although Ramaswamy didn’t describe it as a hard requirement.
“It requires a leader’s will to get into those nuances, do this the right way, rather than just say, ‘Yep, let them run wild, I don’t care, use public money to subsidize, let the electric bills go up, we just want more of it.’… But also going the other direction, it’s equally glib to just say ‘Ban it. I don’t like it,’” Ramaswamy said.
Like other Republicans, Ramaswamy has become far more measured in his comments about data centers as his campaign has progressed. During a March 2025 appearance before the Jefferson County Republican Party, he described Ohio’s data center boom as a “good thing.” The main issue associated with it, he said, was making sure their immense electricity demand didn’t overwhelm the state’s electricity grid. This could be done, he said, by making it faster and easier for companies to build power plants and natural gas pipelines – and data centers too.
“It takes two years to build an AI data center. It takes 36 months to get a new permit for a natural gas pipeline. Six years to get the permit for a new power plant. That has to change in our state,” Ramaswamy said.
