Summary
Major super PACs associated with AI labs and investors have poured close to 600,000 in spending by outside groups, with the vast majority of that figure coming from the super PAC Defend American Jobs, which receives funding from a super PAC financed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He has also received roughly 2 million towards a raft of Senate Republicans that have been supportive of the AI or crypto industry. The list included Rounds. In South Dakota, AI regulation is already a live issue after the state legislature passed a bill earlier this year forcing hyperscalers to bear a larger share of the water and energy costs associated with powering data centers. Data centers have been the subject of a bitter fight among Republicans in the state legislature, which voted against giving tax breaks for equipment and software purchases required by data centers earlier this year, stalling construction of a planned development by Applied Digital, a company that builds and designs data centers. Rounds also ultimately endorsed adding restrictions on data centers, although his senior aide and former chief of staff, Robert Skjonsberg, is a registered lobbyist for Meta for matters before the South Dakota legislature. (Meta operates a network of data centers, though there isn’t currently a Meta-affiliated center in South Dakota.) Rounds’ office told Politico that their general counsel consulted with the Senate ethics committee about the unusual arrangement and was told there was no conflict of interest. Concerns about data centers have been bipartisan across the country: A recent Gallup poll for instance found that seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to data center development, given their outsized draw upon water and energy resources that local communities often end up subsidizing. Comments Back to top