Last year Ohio waived roughly $1.6 billion in state sales taxes, and another $446 million in local taxes, for the companies building data centers here. Over the same stretch, the average Ohio household's electricity bill in July 2025 ran 23.3 percent higher than a year earlier, the third-largest jump in the country. Both numbers describe the same buildout. One is what the state gave the industry. The other is what landed on your monthly bill.
For most of the past two years, the question of who pays for that power lived inside a regulatory docket at PUCO. This summer it climbed out. It is now a U.S. Senate race, a Cleveland.com op-ed, a lawsuit against a village of 3,000, and a ballot measure that quietly died. The venue changed because the money got big enough that politicians want their names on the answer.
The Senate race is now an energy bill
Sherrod Brown, trying to win back the seat he lost in 2024, has made data centers a centerpiece of his campaign against Republican Jon Husted. In an ad reported by Signal Ohio on July 8, Brown calls Husted "the face of data centers in Ohio," accusing him of cutting "sweetheart tax deals" and fast-tracking approvals "while ordinary residents watched their electricity bills explode."
Brown's ask is specific. "They should eliminate the tax breaks," he said. "Why would we want these data centers to come in and use tax dollars to get them here?" A Cleveland.com op-ed this summer put the same point as a question: why should Ohioans pay tech billionaires' energy tab? The framing is the whole fight. The grid is shared infrastructure, and someone underwrites the private profit running through it.
Two candidates, two answers
Husted does not deny that data centers strain the grid. He offers a different fix. In March he stood with President Trump at a White House roundtable to promote a "Ratepayer Protection Pledge," under which firms like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI say they will build, buy, or bring their own power for new AI facilities rather than lean on the existing grid. Husted calls it commonsense policy that keeps energy "reliable, affordable" for local communities while the jobs and tax revenue arrive.
So you have two theories of protection on one ballot. Brown wants to end the subsidy that pulls the industry in. Husted wants to keep the industry and bind it by pledge to cover its own demand. A pledge is only as good as its enforcement, and a tax break only ends if a legislature votes to end it. Which of those you trust is now something you register at the polls.
The reform the legislature would not finish
There was supposed to be a legislative answer. A proposal moving through the Statehouse this spring would have trimmed future data-center tax breaks and, more to the point, barred utilities from shifting the cost of new electric infrastructure onto ratepayers. It stalled. House Speaker Matt Huffman conceded that overriding a likely DeWine veto was "perhaps even impossible," and Republican leaders acknowledged the House lacked the 60 votes to pass elimination outright. Data centers did not make the 2026 ballot. The tax exemptions stayed exactly where they were.
That is the machinery working the way it usually does. The dramatic version of reform, a public vote, never materialized. The quiet version, a rate case at PUCO, is where the real decision keeps getting made, out of sight of the people it bills.
When a village says no
The local end of this fight is sharper. In Lordstown, developers submitted plans for a $3.6 billion data-center campus in October. Weeks later the village council voted 6-0 to ban data centers entirely. The developer, Bristolville 25 Developer LLC, took the village to the Ohio Supreme Court, seeking an order forcing Lordstown to process the application under the state law that was on the books when the plans arrived.
Watch that case. It asks whether an Ohio community that changes its mind about hosting a power-hungry neighbor can actually be made to honor a project it never wanted. The industry is betting the answer is no.
The data centers are coming to Ohio regardless of who wins in November. What November decides is whose theory governs the bill: the candidate who would pull the subsidy, or the one who would keep it and trust a corporate pledge to hold. No one casts a ballot on a tax exemption or a pledge directly. Voters choose the senator, the legislators, and the governor who decide whether either one holds up once the industry starts pushing back.