The data center industry absorbed political blows on opposite sides of the globe this week. In the United States, The Verge reports that developers now face a tougher building climate after midterm voters elected candidates who favor construction moratoriums and approved ballot measures adding new restrictions on where and how facilities can be built.

The backlash reflects growing local resistance to the land, power, and water demands of large-scale computing infrastructure — pressure that has been building as the AI boom accelerates construction across the country.

In Russia, the disruption came from the battlefield rather than the ballot box. After Ukrainian drone strikes hit three Yandex data center facilities, Vladimir Putin announced that Russian companies can now use foreign data centers, per TechRadar — a reversal of the country's push to keep data hosted domestically. The move signals how vulnerable Russia's homegrown hosting capacity has become to Ukraine's deep-strike campaign.

Taken together, the two stories underline that data centers — long treated as invisible back-end infrastructure — are now squarely in the crosshairs of both domestic politics and modern warfare.