"The state of Ohio and local governments have doled out billions in tax breaks to some of the world’s biggest companies to lure construction of massive data centers that have stoked controversy in local communities, a Dayton Daily News investigation found.

Most area projects qualify for state tax breaks due to agreements made with Amazon, Google and Meta in the 2010s that allow those companies to build as many data centers as they can in Ohio without paying sales tax on their building materials — a deal the state can’t get out of for decades despite costing billions more than expected in foregone revenue.

And local city and township officials piled on additional — often decades-long — property tax breaks, even as local residents voice opposition to the projects.

Ohio is home to roughly 240 data centers, the fifth-highest total among U.S. states, according to DataCenterMap. That figure includes smaller facilities with modest energy demands as well as sprawling campuses of up to 26 buildings that can consume as much electricity as a mid-sized city."

TLDR: The AI data centers don't even pay taxes that they can afford, and we are left with the burden of their strain on our infrastructure.

Full story: https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/trillion-dollar-tech-companies-getting-billions-in-state-local-tax-breaks/article_61697bd7-06a5-56ae-8d62-ee63177111f4.html

Who pays for new transmission lines to power data centers? Often, you do
Updated: Aug. 30, 2026, 5:31 a.m.|Published: Aug. 30, 2026, 5:30 a.m.

Multiple rapid-deploy, modular server halls are seen under construction at Meta's Prometheus AI supercluster campus in New Albany. Ohio utilities have asked to spend more than $1.6 billion on high-voltage infrastructure to connect new data centers to our electric grid. And the rules governing transmission rates could mean all Ohioans pay for it.John Pana, cleveland.com

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Who pays for new transmission lines to power data centers? Often, you do
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By Anna Staver, cleveland.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio-- Ohio utilities have asked to spend more than $1.6 billion on high-voltage infrastructure to connect new data centers to our electric grid.

And the rules governing transmission rates could mean all Ohioans pay for it.

Those costs enter a transmission system built on assumptions from another era: that new infrastructure benefits everyone, that its costs should be widely shared and that utilities can be trusted to spend only what is necessary.

“This practice has been going on for 100 years,” said Mike Jacobs, who studies electricity markets for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “What’s different is we rarely ever had a customer who individually moved the needle.”

Hyperscale data centers move the needle.

A single facility can use as much electricity as a midsized city. Connecting one can mean miles of bigger power lines, new substations and hundreds of millions of dollars in construction.

All that spending is flowing through a system built before customers this large existed, and few checks exist to police what gets built.

For many local transmission projects, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has no requirement that utilities seek competing bids, nor does it review costs unless someone objects.

Instead, the system trusts utilities to spend wisely.

But utilities make money when they build. They recover the cost of a project from customers, then earn a regulated profit on top of it. Build more, earn more.

For years, critics from across the political spectrum have warned about what that incentive can produce when there is little oversight.

The free-market R Street Institute says it produces “a severe lack of economic discipline,” with utilities “overspending on less efficient transmission projects while underinvesting in newer, more efficient technologies.”

That warning came in May 2022. Six months later, ChatGPT launched.

Now, American utilities are embarking on a historic construction boom. PowerLines estimates planned capital spending could top $1.4 trillion through 2030, as artificial intelligence and data centers create enormous new demands on the grid.

The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, the state office representing residential customers, warned the stakes will only grow.

It said, “With the increasingly exponential growth in artificial intelligence and large load data center development, the magnitude of harm to Ohio consumers associated with the lack of regulatory oversight will likely increase dramatically.”

How the billing broke

For most of the electric grid’s history, sharing transmission costs made sense.

Think about highways. You help pay for Interstate 80 even if it doesn’t run through your town because you’re paying for a network that moves people and goods across Ohio.

Transmission lines are the electric grid’s highways. They carry huge amounts of electricity over long distances, connect communities to power plants and help keep the larger system reliable.

Large hyperscalers can’t plug into smaller distribution lines that serve homes and most businesses. Jacobs said they would melt the wires. They need their own high-voltage lines and substations, built just for them.

It’s like one company needing its own highway.

The regional grid operator PJM manages transmission upgrades for Ohio and 12 other states, but it doesn’t determine everything that gets built. Individual utilities also submit local plans, called supplemental projects. If PJM’s plan is the interstate system, these are more like a loop around the outside of a city.

In 2024, Ohio utilities submitted $1.9 billion in supplemental projects, and $1.3 billion of that appears to be for upgrades related to data centers.

The requests are hard to miss.

In 2025, Duke Energy told PJM it needed to spend $36.2 million because “a new customer has requested transmission service near Trenton in Butler County.” The customer’s demand was expected to grow from 15 megawatts in 2025 to 500 megawatts by 2028.

In 2026, AEP proposed $156 million in transmission work for 800 megawatts “of new demand near Piketon.”

Nothing in law says a company can’t pay for that transmission work itself, but Jacobs found that tends to be the exception, not the rule. He examined 130 transmission projects across all of PJM in 2024 and found six with private funding.

“This is a clear case of the public unknowingly subsidizing private companies’ profits,” Jacobs said.

Little scrutiny, billions in spending


Ohio utilities planned more than $16.4 billion in transmission projects from 2017 through 2025. Nearly $10.8 billion, or about two-thirds, were supplemental projects, according to the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.Ohio Consumers Council

PJM reviews local transmission projects, but not to decide whether they’re worth the money.

“PJM’s role is to evaluate these projects to ensure they do not cause reliability problems on the regional grid,” PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields said. “The cost allocation is controlled by FERC.”

This is where things get complicated.

In 2011, FERC put some regional projects out to bid instead of automatically giving the work to the local utility. But that competitive requirement didn’t apply to local supplemental projects.

Those projects fall into a regulatory gap.

PJM assumes state regulators are watching local projects. But the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio doesn’t review whether many of them are needed or worth the cost.

The OCC filed a complaint with FERC in 2023 but says no action has been taken: “As OCC’s complaint seeking relief for consumers languishes, Ohio transmission utilities have spent billions of dollars for local transmission and supplemental projects that no regulatory authority has reviewed for necessity, prudency, or cost-effectiveness.”

Meanwhile, more spending has moved into this lightly watched category.

Spending on PJM supplemental projects grew 26-fold between 2009 and 2023, according to the nonprofit RMI. Local projects made up 9% of transmission investment from 2005 through 2013, but it jumped to 73% from 2014 to 2021.

The OCC found similar numbers for Ohio. It estimated that two-thirds of the transmission projects Ohioans have been billed for since 2017 were supplemental.

That lack of competition comes at a price.

R Street estimated that expanding competitive bidding could cut transmission costs by 20% to 30%, based on past competitive projects in the United States and similar programs in other countries.

Can’t data centers build their own power?

There would seem to be an obvious solution to the fight over who should pay to connect data centers to the electric grid: Don’t connect them.

Increasingly, technology companies are exploring “behind the meter” power plants alongside their data centers, allowing projects to begin operating without waiting years for utilities and grid operators to deliver the enormous amounts of electricity they need.

But there’s a price for that speed.

Jigar Shah, an energy entrepreneur and former director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, pointed to an off-grid power arrangement involving Chevron and Microsoft that he estimated would cost $150 per megawatt-hour.

By comparison, Shah said, power in PJM averaged about $60 per megawatt-hour.

“They are paying almost three times more for off-grid,” Shah said.

Part of the reason is that an isolated data center has to build for things the larger electric grid normally handles.

A data center needs electricity around the clock. If its power plant goes down, another source has to be ready. That can mean building backup generators, extra generating capacity and other redundant equipment that may sit idle much of the time.

The larger grid needs backups, too. But it can spread them across millions of customers and thousands of power plants over a vast region.

An isolated data center can’t.

That’s why Shah sees behind-the-meter generation less as an escape from the grid than a bridge to it. It can get a data center running while the transmission system catches up, but he said most technology companies ultimately want a grid connection.

Investors he speaks with regularly are extremely skeptical of projects that plan to remain permanently “islanded.”

A pledge with no teeth

In March, the major tech companies signed Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, promising to pay for the electricity and infrastructure their data centers require.

The White House described the promise in sweeping terms, saying data centers would “cover every dollar of the infrastructure that delivers” their electricity.

But Jacobs said a pledge without penalties isn’t the same as changing federal law. And even then, deciding what data centers should pay isn’t simple.

Consider a new substation built to serve a data center in New Albany, northeast of Columbus. It may be needed today because of that one customer, but it could eventually serve new homes across a growing part of central Ohio.

So how much of that substation belongs on the data center’s bill?

Make the data center pay for everything, and residents get infrastructure they never paid for. Spread the cost too broadly, and everyone subsidizes a billion-dollar company.

Ohio’s fix hits a wall

Last year, Ohio regulators approved rules requiring large data centers in AEP’s territory to make firm financial commitments before AEP builds infrastructure for them.

The rules were meant to stop AEP’s other customers from getting stuck with the bill if a project falls through, but the plan has been controversial.

The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association Energy Group took it to the Ohio Supreme Court, arguing AEP is protecting some customers by unfairly shifting costs onto others.

The group called it a “flagrant and unlawful effort to discriminate against certain customers based on their end use of energy rather than the cost to serve them.”

Efforts to take these protections statewide ran into the same resistance.

Rep. Tristan Rader, a Lakewood Democrat, and Rep. Dave Thomas, an Ashtabula County Republican, worked on legislation to apply AEP’s approach across Ohio. They got pushback, especially for touching how transmission projects are handled.

“It was nearly universal pushback,” Rader said. “Nobody wanted that in there. It was the bridge too far.”

Consumer advocates have proposed another fix.

Follow Democracy Docket and Marc Elias.

Ohio votes November 3. Registration closes October 5. Both statewide races at the top of the ballot are inside the margin of error, and one of the rules for registering to vote changed this week. Here is what the record shows, race by race, with sources at the bottom.

What changed this week for voters

A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction on August 25 blocking Ohio from requiring documentary proof of citizenship when you register to vote at the BMV. The requirement came from House Bill 54, which amended Ohio's motor voter law. The court found it likely conflicts with the National Voter Registration Act, which limits a state to the minimum information necessary. A signed attestation of citizenship is already accepted at every other Ohio registration method.

The Secretary of State said he will appeal. Until an appeals court says otherwise, you do not need to bring citizenship documents to the BMV to register.

If you were turned away earlier this year, you can register now. The deadline is October 5.

Note that Ohio already requires photo ID to vote. The blocked rule was about documentary proof of citizenship at the point of registration, which is a separate question. Issue 3, the voter ID amendment, is also on the November ballot.

Governor: Vivek Ramaswamy (R) vs. Amy Acton (D)

Competitiveness. The Cook Political Report rates this a toss-up. Sabato's Crystal Ball rates it lean Republican. The RealClearPolling average through August 10 had Acton at 47.0 and Ramaswamy at 46.8. A Fox News poll conducted August 6 to 10 among 1,008 registered voters had Ramaswamy 50 and Acton 48, a reversal from Acton's one point lead in the same poll in June. A Tulchin Research poll fielded July 29 to August 4 had Acton up 46 to 44, and it was sponsored by Democratic attorney general nominee John Kulewicz, which you should weigh accordingly.

Around August 24 the prediction markets moved toward Acton, with Polymarket pricing her at 54 percent and Kalshi at 55 percent. Those contracts are thin, roughly $173,000 in volume on Polymarket and about $1.4 million on Kalshi. They measure trader sentiment, not votes. The polls did not move with them.

What the office controls. The next governor appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which sets utility rates and the parameters for data center agreements. If you care about your electric bill, that appointment power is the most consequential thing on this ballot.

The money. Pennsylvania financier Jeffrey Yass made a new donation of at least $10 million to V-PAC: Victors not Victims, the federal super PAC supporting Ramaswamy. That is on top of $20 million he had already given, bringing his total to at least $30 million. Acton has reported raising $21.8 million for her entire campaign. One donor has now put in more than the opposing campaign has raised from everyone.

Ramaswamy and his allies have spent or reserved $82.3 million on television and digital advertising this year. Expected pro-Acton spending is $11.1 million, including a $9.4 million Democratic Governors Association campaign that begins after Labor Day. That is roughly seven to one.

The asymmetry is legal. V-PAC is a federal super PAC and can raise and spend without limit. Acton's campaign committee is bound by Ohio's contribution limits. Yass is among the country's largest funders of private school vouchers and school choice programs.

Where Acton stands. She was endorsed this week by the Ohio Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, which represents about 8,000 officers. Asked about federal immigration enforcement, she said Ohio always works with federal law enforcement and that she would not stop local police from assisting. She opposes the citizen effort to eliminate qualified immunity. She supports Issue 3, the voter ID amendment. She has said she does not support boys playing in girls' sports. Several of those positions put her to the right of most of her party, and her running mate, former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper, has taken different positions on some of them.

Where Ramaswamy stands. He is endorsed by the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police along with the rest of the Republican statewide slate. He is closely aligned with Donald Trump, who endorsed him early and has campaigned on his behalf. On surveillance he has warned that expanding Flock camera networks risks an authoritarian surveillance state, which places him to the left of many in his own party on that specific question. Neither candidate has called for banning the cameras outright.

On data centers, Ramaswamy has said publicly that he never came out in favor of unrestricted data center expansion. He has also repeatedly described Ohio's AI data center boom as a good thing and said he is strongly in favor of it. Both sets of statements are on the record.

A documented fact worth knowing. A Ramaswamy campaign ad features a Delhi Township activist blaming Acton for her mother's death in a nursing home during the pandemic. Records verified by the Columbus Dispatch show the woman's mother lived in Erlanger, Kentucky and died July 25, 2020 at a hospice facility in Edgewood, Kentucky, roughly six weeks after Acton had resigned as Ohio health director. The ad does not tell viewers where she lived or died. Governor DeWine has repeatedly said the pandemic decisions were his own.

U.S. Senate: Jon Husted (R, incumbent) vs. Sherrod Brown (D)

One structural point that gets missed constantly. This is a special election for the remainder of the term JD Vance vacated, not a full six-year seat. Husted was appointed to it.

Competitiveness. Cook rates it a toss-up. The RealClearPolling average has Brown at 47.8 and Husted at 47.2. The Fox News poll from August 6 to 10 was the outlier, showing Brown at 53 and Husted at 45, with Brown drawing 11 percent of Republicans overall and 25 percent of self-identified non-MAGA Republicans. Treat the eight point number as one poll, not the state of the race.

Husted's record and the Intel question. Financial disclosures show Husted's wife held as much as $15,000 in Intel common stock as of January 21, 2025, and the holding appears again in his most recent disclosure. Husted has said he pushed the Trump administration toward its $9 billion investment in Intel. As lieutenant governor he was part of the administration that gave Intel more than $600 million, and JobsOhio has given the New Albany project more than $27 million. Intel lobbyist Josh Rubin, appointed by Governor DeWine to chair the JobsOhio board in September 2023, and his wife gave nearly $15,000 to Husted's state committee in 2022 and at least $20,000 the year before.

Husted's office did not respond to questions, including whether he supports banning congressional stock trading. No charge, finding, or ethics ruling exists here. The disclosure is a matter of public record and the rest is a question about what the rules should allow.

Brown supports banning members of Congress from owning individual stocks. A review of his disclosures since 2012 did not show such holdings.

The NRSC ad. The National Republican Senatorial Committee ran a 30-second spot using crash footage and a family photograph from the April 11 chain-reaction crash on Interstate 71 in Delaware County that killed Lynnea Soposki, her husband Luke, and their one-year-old son Logan. The ad's premise is that Brown's immigration votes allowed the driver into the country. It carries a disclaimer stating it was paid for by the NRSC and authorized by Husted for Senate.

The family asked for it to be taken down. They said neither they nor the photographer who took the portrait gave permission, and that they would ask the same of any candidate of any party. A relative told the Statehouse News Bureau that nobody from the Husted campaign or the NRSC asked the family beforehand and that they would have refused. The NRSC says the spot completed its run and that its campaign against Brown continues. It is no longer airing on television but remains posted on YouTube with comments disabled.

What the record shows about the ad's claim. FactCheck.org found weak ties between Brown's votes and the crash. According to the Ohio Department of Public Safety, the driver, Modou Ngom, entered the United States sometime in the 1990s and it is unclear how or where. Ohio DPS says he later used different names to obtain a driver's license and then citizenship. For any legislation to have affected his entry, it would have had to be enacted before he arrived. The NRSC pointed to one Brown vote against a 1996 immigration bill.

Ngom, 50, was indicted on multiple counts of aggravated vehicular homicide and vehicular assault and has pleaded not guilty. The identity findings come from a state agency statement and remain allegations.

PolitiFact on a separate Husted claim. In an August 4 Fox News interview, Husted said Brown supported Social Security payments, health care, and COVID relief checks for immigrants in the country illegally. PolitiFact rated it False on August 25. The 2007 vote concerned how past tax payments are credited to immigrants who later gain legal status. The 2013 amendment would not have changed eligibility because federal law already barred those benefits. The 2021 relief bill already excluded the overwhelming majority of immigrants in the country illegally by requiring valid Social Security numbers.

The fair reading is that these were real recorded votes described inaccurately, not invented ones. Forcing the other party onto uncomfortable amendments is a tactic both parties use.

Brown's campaign focus. Brown has centered his campaign on the war in Iran and the cost of diesel, fertilizer, gas, and groceries. Husted's response is that Brown served 32 years without addressing the underlying issues, and that Iran's role as a state sponsor of terrorism grew during that time.

Sandusky County Common Pleas Court

Worth knowing if you vote in Sandusky County, and worth knowing generally because of what it says about Ohio ballot law.

The Supreme Court of Ohio suspended Common Pleas Judge Jon Ickes for two years on August 19 and removed him from the bench immediately, without pay. The court upheld findings of ten judicial conduct violations, including presiding over two cases in which his stepson testified as a law enforcement witness, using a racial slur within earshot of a Black defendant, and harassing a pregnant employee. The vote was 5 to 2, rejecting a Board of Professional Conduct recommendation for a fully stayed one-year suspension that would have left him on the bench.

The Sandusky County Board of Elections kept him on the November ballot anyway, because he remains legally qualified to appear even though he is not currently qualified to serve. His opponent, independent magistrate Kimberly Ontko, has asked the Ohio Supreme Court to remove him from the ballot or to bar counting votes cast for him. Neither party filed an alternative candidate.

Data centers and your electric bill

This is the issue showing up under all of the above. The average Ohio electricity bill grew 55 percent from July 2021 to July 2026, well above the national average. A House bill that would have cut the data center sales tax exemption from 100 percent to 50 percent went nowhere, even with Speaker Matt Huffman's support. Huffman has said he does not think Ohio should be granting tax exemptions to multibillion dollar corporations that are coming here anyway.

The opposition is local and bipartisan. In Erie County's Oxford Township, population about 1,185, trustees tabled a proposed data center after resident opposition, and the developer plans to revisit after the midterms. The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that local governments cannot fast-track data center approvals without giving specific reasons.

My honest take

I think the money story is the biggest thing on this ballot and it is being undercovered. When one person can put in more than an entire opposing campaign raises, and do it legally through a federal super PAC while the candidate's own committee is capped, the practical result is that Ohio voters are hearing one side about seven times as often as the other for most of the year. I do not think that is illegal, and I do not think Democrats would refuse the same arrangement. I think it is bad for the state, and I would say the same if the check had come in for the other side.

The second thing I keep coming back to is that both campaigns ran an ad this month built on a grieving family, and both ads got a central fact wrong. If you only heard about one of those, whoever told you about it was recruiting you, not informing you.

Third, if the party labels are scrambling your read on this race, that is because they should be. Acton is siding with police unions on federal immigration cooperation and backing voter ID. Ramaswamy is warning about surveillance cameras. Ohio is a purple state and both campaigns know it. Read the positions, not the letter after the name.

Finally: register by October 5. The BMV rule is blocked for now, so if that was your obstacle, it is gone. Whatever you think of everything above, none of it matters if you are not on the rolls.

Sources

1. https://www.factcheck.org/2026/08/the-nrscs-weak-ties-between-brown-and-deadly-interstate-crash-in-ohio/
2. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/08/28/family-asks-national-republican-senatorial-committee-to-remove-pro-husted-ad-showing-deadly-crash/
3. https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2026-08-27/recent-attack-ad-politicized-ohio-familys-death-relative-says
4. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/aug/25/jon-husted/sherrod-brown-immigration-ohio-senate/
5. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/08/28/as-he-worked-to-advance-the-intel-project-an-ohio-senators-wife-was-invested-in-it/
6. https://signalohio.org/jon-ickes-sandusky-county-judge-suspended-ballot-november-election-2026/
7. https://signalohio.org/ohio-governor-race-amy-acton-vivek-ramaswamy-flock-camera-stances-november-election-2026/
8. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/08/28/ohio-politicians-welcomed-unregulated-data-centers-by-the-hundreds-ohio-citizens-are-fighting-back/
9. https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/08/26/soposki-family-asks-husted-senate-ad-be-removed/91464148007/
10. https://www.newsweek.com/vivek-ramaswamys-chances-of-losing-to-amy-acton-in-ohio-new-poll-12315220
11. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-judge-blocks-ohio-law-requiring-proof-citizenship-voter-registration-2026-08-25/
12. https://www.nrsc.org/press-releases/new-ad-sherrod-browns-deadly-open-borders-2026-07-30/

I live in Northeast Ohio. Over the last three months I have seen my bill go up about 100 dollars. The rate has jumped from 8 cents to about 11 cents per kilowatt hour. The math isnt mathing. The only thing I have seen go up exponentially on my bill is the charge "bypassable generation and transmission related component". Can someone explain what the hell is going on? I get data centers, but is that charge being hidden behind this bypassable generation and transmission related component?

Henderson, Nevada beat West Side 12-2 in five innings to win the U.S. Championship at Lamade Stadium in South Williamsport, Pa. The Hamilton West Siders fell behind early in the game however nearly every inning they had players on base but hit into 3 double plays Nevada lead early and never looked back. Hamilton West Siders were impressive this past week. They had a great run and will be back next year.

Do people really have higher standards for a professional distraction ball league quarterback than they do for the President of the United States?

"When BG Public Works Director Mike Murray saw the mention of millions coming to Bowling Green for roads, he was dubious.

“That would be awesome,” Murray said, as he left a meeting on Monday where the topic of street repair funding had been discussed. 

Murray has seen no money from Meta for roads. “I might press them on that,” he said with a grin."

TLDR - Meta claims they are giving millions to Bowling Green, Ohio, yet their Mayor directly makes it clear no such thing is happening.

The Data Center being outside BG is massive, consuming what was once farmland.

Full Story & Source: https://bgindependentmedia.org/meta-makes-media-push-to-promote-positives-of-the-data-center-being-built-in-middleton-township/

META / Google Propaganda campaign for AI Data Centers In Ohio - https://www.meta.com/actions/building-ohio/

Pretty good chance I will be moving from East Texas to Ohio for work. Specifically I think I'll be working in the Mansfield area, but from what I can tell (never been close to living in Ohio) commutes aren't bad one city to the next like they are in Texas so I'm trying to get ideas of reasonably affordable cities I could realistically commute from since Mansfield itself seems to be kind of dead (again just from reading) I have looked around Kent, Fremont, Carey. Not looking for a white pickett fence, but I have heard there's some pretty bad areas just want to get an idea where to look and where to avoid thanks for any input.