In the Ohio governor race, Democratic candidate Amy Acton announced that she will not hold individual stocks after taking office and has called on her Republican opponent Vivek Ramaswamy to sell his positions in companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon related to data centers. The Republican camp retaliated, claiming that Acton and her campaign partner also hold stocks in these companies. The controversy centers around job commitments and electricity load.

On September 15, Acton pledged that she currently holds no individual stocks and will not invest in or hold individual stocks during her term as governor, specifically mentioning that Ramaswamy has personal investments worth millions in data centers. Independent reports verified her disclosures, which included Microsoft and Iron Mountain, which operates data centers near Dayton. In July, she proposed conditional suspensions: new projects must bear the full costs of gas, water, and electricity, use only local union labor, abandon confidentiality agreements, prioritize brownfields and old industrial areas, and not relax air and groundwater standards, or they will be defaulted upon.

Ramaswamy disclosed holdings ranging from chips to cloud to industrial real estate: he holds Nvidia directly and through the Strive U.S. Semiconductor ETF he co-founded, with the fund's position valued between $1 million and $5 million in the 2023 federal disclosures; he also has stakes in Microsoft, Amazon, and other large cloud providers with data centers in Ohio, as well as industrial REITs and digital infrastructure funds. He has not committed to reducing his holdings. His policy has shifted from welcoming supercomputing facilities to "Ohioans first": community residents' electricity costs will be borne by the projects, local property tax exemptions will be canceled, confidentiality agreements with local governments will be prohibited, and efforts will be made to utilize old industrial land. The governor will appoint members to the Public Utilities Commission and the JobsOhio board, directly impacting electricity pricing and incentive negotiations.

Locally, legislation has already been enacted. As of September 17, at least 138 municipalities and townships have paused data center projects, about 23 communities have effectively banned them, and over twenty others are in discussions. Four cities will vote on permanent bans in November. A Reuters poll indicated that 71% of voters in the state support a temporary construction halt. At the state level, data center sales tax incentives from 2024 to 2025 will result in over $2 billion less revenue for the state; the chamber of commerce previously reported about $40 billion in investments. Amid the impact on electricity costs, PJM capacity costs have pushed residential bills up by about 25.7% year-on-year. The current governor has suspended the review of related tax benefits amounting to about $1.6 billion annually.

Who is buying and who is selling: the buyer is the governor's appointment power that can decide data center locations and electricity cost sharing, while the seller is the next wave of contracts in Ohio for capital expenditures from Nvidia to Amazon. The events are driven by stock ownership attacks, with funds moving simultaneously in campaign ads, local bans, and utility rate cases. The beneficiaries are operators who have already secured access, while the pressured parties are towns and districts that must pass new loads onto residents' electricity bills, as well as candidates who have overlapping stock and regulatory powers. Both sides claim to protect farmland and require projects to pay for their own electricity, with the divergence being whether to default to open or closed doors.

Public disclosures provide range estimates, not real-time market values; the "58 companies" mentioned by the parties have not been individually listed in verified independent reports. Election day is about six weeks away.

Source: Public Information