After pouring more than $1.1B into federal lobbying the past two years, Big Tech is increasingly redirecting its political firepower to the places where its data center projects actually live or die: statehouses and municipalities. That pivot is accelerating just as major states like Texas and California ramp up their focus on data center regulation.
The industry’s spending patterns are shifting as the battleground changes. Local officials, not federal regulators, decide zoning, tax breaks and interconnection approvals for data centers — the levers that determine whether billions in digital infrastructure projects ever break ground. 
“This is just not something that we were looking at as a factor…​