Vivek Ramaswamy has unveiled his plan for dealing with data centers – one the Republican governor candidate claims would require any newly built facilities to provide nearby residents with free electricity.
In his announcement Thursday, Ramaswamy said new data centers will have to do so as a condition of state approval. Or as he put it, “If a data center is built in your community, then … you will no longer have to pay for your home’s electricity.” But the idea would face technical and regulatory hurdles that Ramaswamy’s plan doesn’t address.
This part of Ramaswamy’s proposal goes beyond the increasingly standard idea of requiring data centers to pay for the massive infrastructure upgrades their facilities require, rather than passing the costs to other customers on the power grid. Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, is among the candidates who recently released a version of this proposal. Politicians in both parties have shifted their approach to data centers in response to the growing political backlash they’ve spurred in Ohio and elsewhere as electricity prices recently hit all-time highs.
Ramaswamy’s plan also calls for banning new data centers from receiving property tax abatements. Instead, he proposed redistributing tax revenues from data centers by using them to fund tax rebates for neighboring property owners.
Like Acton, he also called for data centers to adhere to environmental rules for air pollution and water quality. Ramaswamy said he’d “emphasize” building data centers on already-developed abandoned industrial sites, rather than farmland and other undeveloped land. Acton proposed something similar, although in her plan it was a hard requirement.
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Ramaswamy said he’ll issue an executive order after taking office pausing data center construction until legislation can be passed implementing his ideas.
“If any one of these three conditions is not met, the data center won’t be built. Period,” Ramaswamy said.
Notably, neither Acton nor Ramaswamy have called for ending Ohio’s sales tax exemption for data centers.
Gov. Mike DeWine paused the exemption in May after Signal Statewide reported the tax exemption’s price tag grew to $2 billion (including state and local taxes) in 2025, vastly larger than the state’s previous estimates.
Unlike Ramaswamy, Acton has called for requiring data centers to be built and maintained with union workers, and for them to have greater transparency requirements, including banning local government officials from entering into non-disclosure agreements with data center developers.
In a statement, Acton campaign spokeswoman Addie Bullock accused Ramaswamy of introducing his plan to “distract Ohioans from his pro-data center record and personal investments in data centers.”
“His ‘plan’ would allow data centers to continue flooding into Ohio with out-of-control tax breaks and secret NDAs. No matter how many scam policies he rolls out, Ohioans know that Vivek Ramaswamy is an out-of-touch billionaire who will do anything to enrich himself and his billionaire buddies, thinks Ohioans are ‘lazy’ and ‘mediocre,’ and calls affordability a ‘buzzword,’” Bullock said.
Questions surround Ramaswamy’s free electricity plan
It’s unclear how feasible the free-electricity part of Ramaswamy’s plan is. It hinges on what’s called “behind the meter” power – or the electricity that developers generate by building private power plants solely meant to fuel a planned nearby data center facility.
These kinds of developments are designed to help a data center stay off the broader electricity grid – and thus avoid a lengthy approval process, as well as the special costs utilities like American Electric Power have attempted to impose on data centers to charge them for their exceptionally large electricity use and the hardware required to facilitate it. Data centers recently have begun constructing more private natural gas plants to avoid those hurdles – especially after Republicans rewrote Ohio’s energy laws in 2025 to encourage them to do so.
In Ramaswamy’s plan, if a new data center’s private power plant generates more electricity than the data center needs, it would be required to provide the extra electricity for free to nearby customers – in the form of statement credits that the data center developers would finance.
But exporting extra electricity to the grid would require connecting those behind-the meter-plants to the broader grid, which requires corresponding approval from grid operators.
PJM, the multi-state electricity grid operator that Ohio is a part of, is in the process of rolling out rules for data centers that provide their own electricity. But they’ve only gotten partial approval from federal regulators so far.
It’s also unclear whether Ramaswamy’s plan would require data centers to create more electricity than they need to help pay for the free power for the community he said they’d be required to provide.
Ramaswamy described Acton’s plan, which also bears similarities to a plan Republican lawmakers pursued over the summer, as copying his ideas.
“My Democrat opponent recently announced that data centers must not contribute to higher electric bills for ratepayers, a concept that I advocated for in early 2025 long before she started parroting the same,” Ramaswamy said. “This is obvious but insufficient. We can and must go further for Ohio families.”
Shifting politics of data centers
When he launched his campaign in 2025, Ramaswamy was more positive when talking about data centers on the campaign trail. He described Ohio’s data center boom – which building trades unions have praised as providing 25,000 construction jobs – as a “good thing” for the state’s economy.
The main trade-off, he said, was making sure their immense electricity demand didn’t overwhelm the state’s electricity grid.
His proposed solution was overhauling state regulations to allow developers to build natural gas plants and pipelines – and data centers too – more quickly.
But Ramaswamy and other Republicans have shifted their focus to electricity costs as the political backlash surrounding data centers has grown.
Similarly, Democrats initially were hesitant to criticize data centers because of their union support. But recently, Acton and U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown increasingly have shifted toward blaming Republicans for their proliferation.
In his statement on Thursday, Ramaswamy said Acton took some of his ideas in her plan. He also acknowledged data centers are a political liability for him in a YouTube interview with conservative activist Stephanie Stock on Wednesday.
“I just want to be clear because I’ve never once come out and said ‘Hey, I am pro-data center expansion. Have a free for all. Have it.’ Absolutely not,” Ramaswamy said. “But that being said, this is politics and I think our opponents have had some success in trying to paint me that way.”
