Delaware’s data center buildout is now a frontline political fight, with building trades unions running their own candidates for New Castle County Council to secure pro-construction votes.
The immediate flashpoint is a proposed, energy-hungry AI data center near Delaware City and a paused county ordinance that would tighten data center regulations.
Unions, led by the Delaware Building Trades Council and its combative president James Maravelias, are aligning with business interests to push data center and logistics projects as “industrial revolution” job engines.
Environmental and consumer groups are on the other side, warning about data center growth, energy demand, and siting, echoing a past fight that killed a prior data center plan at UD’s STAR Campus.
The outcome of these races will help determine how easy it is to site and permit future AI data centers in the county, how strict local rules are on power-hungry facilities, and which vendors can move fastest.
This story is worth a close read if you care about how local politics, unions, and environmental pushback are about to shape the real-world deployment of AI infrastructure.
Source: Unions reenter New Castle County politics amid a data center fight
