Super PAC funded by Andreessen, Horowitz and Brockman plans data center ads for midterms

New group will advertise for data centers in three states

A pro-AI super political action committee backed by some of Silicon Valley's best-known investors has spawned a new group, Build American AI, that intends to run ads promoting data centers to voters in battleground states ahead of the midterm elections. According to TechCrunch, which cites reporting from several outlets, the campaign aims to convince citizens of the virtues of having data centers built near where they live.

Build American AI told Bloomberg that its ads will focus on Kansas, Ohio and Wisconsin, three states where anxiety over data center development has moved to the center of statewide races. The group describes its advertising budget as being in the millions of dollars.

The money trail leads to Andreessen, Horowitz and Brockman

Build American AI says it is affiliated with Leading the Future (LTF), a super PAC that launched with more than $50 million in funding and is heavily backed by venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, along with OpenAI President Greg Brockman, TechCrunch reports. Citing Politico, the outlet says LTF has so far directed most of its money toward donations to individual politicians, supporting candidates who advocate for AI while working against those who lobby opposed to the technology.

OpenAI has already distanced itself

LTF's activity has proven controversial enough that OpenAI publicly cut ties with it in a June blog post. As TechCrunch quotes it, the company wrote that OpenAI "does not direct the activities of LTF, or have visibility into their operations," referring to support the PAC has received from Brockman and his wife Anna. OpenAI went further, urging AI advocacy groups to be transparent about their policy views and honest about whom they represent, and to avoid astroturfing — manufacturing the appearance of grassroots support — which it said obscures the real choices facing policymakers and the public.

Part of a much larger spending campaign

LTF is not the only politically active organization with big tech money behind it. TechCrunch points out that Anthropic supports Public First Action, a group that favors AI regulation, indicating that major players in the industry are investing on different sides of the policy fight.

Andreessen and Horowitz themselves are, as The New York Times put it, "spending on politics like no other." By the paper's calculations, their firm Andreessen Horowitz is the largest disclosed donor to the midterm elections so far, outspending better-known figures such as Elon Musk and George Soros, with more than $115 million in disclosed federal contributions. Alongside AI causes, the firm is also heavily backing pro-crypto efforts, particularly through the Fairshake super PAC.

Why it matters

Until recently, whether a data center got built was a question settled in zoning meetings, fought over power draw, water use, noise and land. It is now the subject of multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns in statewide elections, funded by some of the wealthiest people in tech. For AI's biggest backers the logic is straightforward: compute capacity is the physical constraint on the industry's growth, and local opposition can delay or kill projects for years. Buying electoral influence is cheaper than losing the race to build.

For voters in Kansas, Ohio and Wisconsin, the arrival of these ads raises the transparency problem OpenAI itself flagged: enthusiasm for data centers that looks organic may in fact be paid for and coordinated from Silicon Valley. More broadly, the campaign marks AI infrastructure's full entry into electoral politics. The industry is no longer only lobbying regulators behind closed doors; it is now asking voters directly for permission to build — and spending heavily to get the answer it wants.