As campaigns for governor are headed into the last week before the election, Democratic candidate for governor Amy Acton is on the offensive, launching a new ad about where her opponent stands on data centers. But a political action committee (PAC) supporting Republican Vivek Ramaswamy is also putting a new ad out on his behalf that goes after Acton on data centers.
Acton's ad, launching on digital platforms, uses Ramaswamy’s own words as well as her message about his involvement with data centers. "We have an AI data center boom in Ohio which is great. I'm all for it. I'm strongly in favor of it," Ramaswamy said in the ad.
Acton’s running mate David Pepper said voters need to know there is a big difference between the two candidates.
“The bottom line is, there's been no more pro-data center candidate in America than Vivek Ramaswamy" Pepper said in an interview. "Just look at what he said to audiences for years. Look at his financial ties to data centers. He's just been nonstop for them.”
Pepper said the moratorium on data centers Acton called for in July requires data centers to pay their own freight in taxes, provide their own energy, should use union labor for construction of them, meet environmental standards, be transparent and have agreement in place with the community. Acton hasn't said the moratorium would be done by executive order, but legislation would require working with the Republican-dominated General Assembly.
At the same time, V-PAC, the independent expenditure group made up of financiers and tech giants including Elon Musk that has is spending an estimated $45 million to elect Ramaswamy, is also on the air with a new ad on data centers that's part of a $9 million buy.
"Amy Acton invested in big tech companies nine data centers across Ohio - data centers that cause higher energy costs," said a voiceover in the ad that started this weekend.
In a forum at the Columbus Metropolitan Club earlier this month, Ramaswamy said he opposes property tax breaks for data centers. And he said they need to provide their own energy, must pay electricity costs for neighbors of those projects. He also said data centers need to be transparent, not damage water quality, and ideally be built on abandoned industrial sites instead of fertile farmland.
“The real question is: what is the benefit to Ohioans and to a local community of building a data center?" Ramaswamy told the audience in the forum. "If there's a net benefit to a local community and they want it, we should have a path to seeing that get built. If there isn't a benefit to a local community, then it should not get built in this state.”
Both candidates have had some investment in data centers, but they're different. Acton’s campaign said she sold all of her individual stocks in April and transitioned her IRA to invest in exchange traded funds where that are invested as a bundle rather than individual stocks. The campaign said she made the decision to sell months before she announced her conditional data center moratorium.
In May, liberal-leaning Innovation Ohio reported Ramaswamy holds investments across multiple sectors connected to data center development. The report said Ramaswamy holds financial positions in every link in that chain, creating a scenario where, as governor, he would be regulating an industry in which he is also a primary shareholder.
The Journal-News in Hamilton reported Ramaswamy said he didn’t realize he had some of the investments and said it "might be a speck of dust in a portfolio of biotech and other holdings." When the outlet asked Ramaswamy if he’d keep investments in those companies if elected governor, he said he'd sell them.
The new ads on data centers are just the latest of many. Ad Impact Politics, which tracks political advertising, reports $79.2 million more has been spent on ads for Ramaswamy than on ads for Acton. Still, the Cook Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball have moved the race for governor in Ohio—a state which voted for President Trump three times and has only one Democrat elected statewide—from "toss-up" to "leans Democrat". And predictive markets have Acton far ahead of Ramaswamy going into the last week of the campaign.
