Ohio / ballot

Why it matters

This is currently the largest tail risk to U.S. data center site readiness that Cliff's wiki doesn't have its own page for. Per the May 2 ConstructConnect data, Ohio + Illinois + the rust-belt corridor saw $22B in Q1 2026 data center starts — the largest regional concentration in the country, much of it driven by AEP's announced 10 GW data center campus 765 kV buildout. A constitutional ban on >25 MW facilities would functionally cancel essentially all of that future pipeline if it qualifies for the ballot AND passes. Signature thresholds in Ohio for constitutional amendments are notoriously hard (last successful one was Issue 1 abortion, 2023, ~700K collected); 413K in 12 weeks against organized hyperscaler money is a steep climb but not zero. Worth opening a new strategy/ohio-data-center-ballot-2026.md page tracking: signature progress (deliverable July 1), polling once on ballot, hyperscaler counter-spend, and the legal question of whether already-permitted facilities are grandfathered (the Hunterbrook reporting on Meta's 'secretly-behind' $1B Ohio facility is the lead worst-case). For the regulatory-knowledge-graph: ballot-initiative bans are a different regulatory class than legislative bans — the political-economy risk is concentrated in 6 weeks of signature gathering + 4 weeks of campaigning, not in legislative log-rolling. Ohio is a leading indicator for whether the ballot-initiative channel becomes the next vector after county-level moratoriums.