Ohio's business establishment is rolling out a new campaign Wednesday aimed at cooling the statewide backlash against data centers, betting that better information — not TV ads — can shift public opinion in towns that have moved to ban or freeze the massive server farms. Future Ready Ohio, launched by the Ohio Business Roundtable, arrives as polling shows most Americans do not want the facilities anywhere near their neighborhoods.
A Year in the Making, Timed to a Wave of Local Bans
Pat Tiberi, president of the Ohio Business Roundtable, said members of the group had been discussing data centers for a year before the campaign's debut, according to Cleveland.com. The effort predates last month's memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warning that the data center issue had become a political anchor for U.S. Senate candidate Jon Husted, whose opponent, Sherrod Brown, has made the topic a centerpiece of his campaign. Tiberi framed the initiative as strictly informational. “It's not about supporting or opposing an issue on the ballot; it's about providing facts,” he said, per the same report.
Future Ready Ohio plans to rely on local discussions between school superintendents and residents rather than a paid advertising blitz, and the group does not plan television ads anytime soon, the outlet reported. Tiberi said the value of those community conversations is that they let residents see whether attitudes about data centers are shifting over time.
New Albany's Zoning Model as a Counterexample
Part of the campaign's pitch rests on New Albany, which now hosts roughly 40 data centers after officials there designated specific areas for the facilities rather than letting developers pick sites near neighborhoods, the report notes. Tiberi argued that data centers can bring jobs and tax revenue without overwhelming communities when built appropriately, and he attributed bad community experiences elsewhere to poor local planning or developers taking advantage of towns. He also acknowledged that not every tax abatement has been a good deal for the community that granted it, and that nondisclosure agreements — the kind Microsoft dropped in June — have eroded public trust.
Tiberi opposes outright bans on data center projects, instead backing efforts to negotiate better deals, according to the same account. The Ohio Business Roundtable also backed AEP Ohio's new tariff, which requires large-load customers to make long-term financial commitments and is designed to prevent other ratepayers from funding grid upgrades for projects that ultimately fail, the report states.
Ashville's Fight Reaches the Ohio Supreme Court
The tension the campaign is trying to defuse is visible in Ashville, where a proposed development included two data centers and a natural gas plant, and where developer EdgeConneX offered up to $115 million for local governments and schools, the report says. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of forwarding a resident-led petition there, ordering Ashville's fiscal officer to send it to elections officials — a fight Hoodline covered in detail in its Ashville data center showdown. Allison Meade, a resident quoted in the Cleveland.com report, said data centers and their power plants do not belong near villages, towns, cities, schools, and youth sports fields. Nick Owens, another resident cited in the piece, said hyperscale data centers cause more pollution, higher electrical bills, and destruction of prime farmland.
Statewide, Conserve Ohio has helped residents put local data center restrictions on ballots in 10 communities and is seeking to amend the Ohio Constitution to ban new hyperscale facilities, according to the report. The group has collected more than 130,000 signatures since April, still short of the roughly 413,000 valid signatures needed to make the November 2026 ballot — a shortfall confirmed by the Tribune Chronicle, which reported the group's constitutional amendment target has now shifted to the 2027 election cycle.
Public Opinion Runs Against the Industry
The skepticism Future Ready Ohio hopes to address is not just local. A May 2026 Gallup survey found 71% of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their area, with nearly half saying they strongly oppose such projects. U.S. data centers consumed 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a figure the Cleveland.com report placed alongside a comparison noting that Lake Erie holds roughly 127 trillion gallons.
Ohio business leaders want communities to think twice before rejecting data center projects outright, arguing the facilities are a necessary part of modern life, according to the report. Future Ready Ohio has said data centers should cover their own grid costs, echoing the logic behind the state's new tariff structure approved by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio in July 2025, which requires large data center customers to sign 12-year contracts and pay for at least 85% of their contracted capacity even if it goes unused.
The Numbers Driving the Debate
The financial stakes behind the campaign are enormous. AEP Ohio told state regulators in February that data center developers have signed binding contracts for 5,642 megawatts under the new tariff, pushing total contracted data center load in its territory to 17,861 megawatts through 2035 — nearly double the utility's historical peak demand across all customer classes, which has ranged between 8,000 and 10,500 megawatts. An October 2025 study from the Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation found the industry supported 95,217 total jobs and added $11.8 billion to the state's GDP in 2024, part of more than $40 billion in private capital investment in Ohio data centers since 2017.
Those figures sit alongside older commitments that current lawmakers cannot easily unwind. Contracts signed between 2014 and 2018 under former Governor John Kasich granted companies including Amazon, Meta, and Google 100% sales tax exemptions for up to 40 years on data center equipment statewide, provided investment reached $8 billion — exemptions state analyses say now cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Governor Mike DeWine paused all new data center tax exemption requests in May while a state legislative joint committee studies the industry's statewide impact. According to an Ohio Legislature fiscal note for H.B. 646, 18 data center projects are currently approved for SUT exemptions, with one to two projects approved per year in recent years.
Local Bans Keep Spreading Across Ohio
Future Ready Ohio's launch comes as more communities move in the opposite direction from the industry's preferred path. Westlake enacted a six-month data center moratorium this week, and Plain City froze new projects for a year over concerns about Big Darby Creek. Trenton City Council placed a resident-led charter amendment banning large-scale data centers on the November ballot after the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously ordered the city to submit the initiative to voters, according to 91.7 WVXU.
At the federal level, U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno has proposed legislation that would impose a 100% federal clawback tax on state and local data center tax incentives, arguing taxpayer funds should not subsidize facilities that create relatively few permanent operational jobs. Whether Future Ready Ohio's information campaign can slow that momentum, or whether more towns follow Westlake, Plain City, and Trenton toward outright restrictions, remains an open question as the fight over Ohio's power grid and its ballots continues into 2027.
