Ohio is now the second state where a coordinated grassroots campaign is collecting signatures to put a sweeping data center ban on the November ballot. Yahoo News reports that advocates need 413,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties by July 1 to qualify. The proposed constitutional amendment would ban any new data center with peak load exceeding 25 megawatts monthly. The Ohio Ballot Board approved signature collection about a month before publication. The campaign is run by volunteers, primarily concentrated in southern Ohio.
The 25 MW threshold is the part of the proposal that should get every hyperscaler's attention. That is below the size of most hyperscale halls, which generally start at 30 to 40 MW per phase and scale up from there. A 25 MW cap effectively forbids any new hyperscale buildout in the state without exception. The threshold is not a compromise. It is a structural rejection.
Ohio currently hosts about 200 data centers, ranking fifth among U.S. states. The concentration is in central Ohio around Columbus, where Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta have all built or announced major facilities over the last five years. The 25 MW threshold would not touch existing facilities. It would prevent expansion. New Albany, Dublin, and the rural counties west of Columbus that were positioned as the next wave of hyperscale would all be frozen.
The petition organizers have framed the campaign around utility bills. Large data centers consume electricity equivalent to roughly 100,000 homes each. Multiple Ohio utilities have filed rate cases attributing increases to load growth from data centers. Residential customers see the line item on their bills and are now coordinating a statewide constitutional response.
If the signatures qualify and the measure passes, the cooling vendor base loses its single largest pipeline state outside Virginia. Ohio was projected to absorb a material share of the $750 billion AI capex buildout over the next five years. The orders implied by that buildout for CDU, RDHx, cold plate, and high-density chiller equipment are now exposed to a statewide ballot risk that did not exist 60 days ago.
The cooling implications also run the other direction. Some operators are already adjusting site selection assumptions to favor states with lower political risk profiles. The Ohio campaign accelerates that adjustment. The states getting reweighted up include the Mountain West for free cooling availability, parts of the Pacific Northwest for water and hydro power, and pockets of the South where renewable subsidies remain stable. The states getting reweighted down include Ohio, Wisconsin, parts of Virginia, and now Utah pending the November referendum.
413,000 signatures from at least 44 of 88 counties in two months is a steep target for an all-volunteer campaign. The historical base rate for grassroots Ohio amendment campaigns is below 50%. Most fail to qualify. The campaign's leadership team acknowledged that volunteer organization is the constraint. If the data center industry mounts a serious counter-campaign, the qualification odds drop further.
But the political pattern is important even if this specific measure does not qualify. The ballot threshold provides a measurable signal of how broad the opposition base is. If Ohio gets to 200,000 signatures by July 1, even short of qualification, the legislative pressure on the state to pass moratorium legislation through Columbus will be substantial. Wisconsin's moratorium bills followed a similar trajectory, starting as advocacy and migrating into formal legislation within six months.
Operators with Ohio sites in the pre-permitting phase should accelerate any work that does not depend on the November ballot outcome. Operators with sites in active permitting should be modeling a scenario where the ballot qualifies and passes, which would not retroactively cancel approved permits but would freeze expansion options. The cooling vendor base supplying Ohio projects should be tracking the signature count, the polling, and the campaign's funding base. The order pipeline depends on whether a few thousand Ohio volunteers can collect signatures fast enough between now and July 1.