NEW YORK, Nov 6 — Voters in dozens of American cities approved restrictions or outright bans on data centres during Tuesday’s midterm elections, in one of the clearest signals that a groundswell of anger over the AI boom has cut across political divides.

“Democrat, Republican, that didn’t matter,” said Alisha Lange, a farmer from Piqua, Ohio. “People want their town back.”

She was one of the driving forces behind the grassroots group Save Piqua, which advocated for a ban on data centres with a capacity of more than 25 megawatts, effectively ruling out any large-scale project.

The ban passed in a ballot measure on Tuesday and now jeopardises the construction of a data centre worth more than US$1 billion (RM4.04 billion) planned by Meta, even though the project had already been approved.