A tool, not a verdict

Follow the money yourself

This site tells you who paid for every study it cites. That is the easy half. The harder and more useful half is the money around the decisions: who funds the regulators who decide what a data center pays for its power, and who funds the groups arguing on both sides. Nearly all of it is public. Here is how to look it up, in your state, without taking our word for anything.

1. Find out whether you elect your utility regulators

Utility commissions decide who pays for the power plants and transmission lines a data center needs: the company, or everyone else on the grid. In most states the governor appoints those commissioners. In a minority of states, including Georgia, voters elect them instead. Where they are elected, they run campaigns, and campaigns file donor reports, which is where this gets interesting.

Do not trust a list of those states, including one we nearly published here. States change the method, and lists go stale fast: New Mexico's commissioners were elected until voters amended the state constitution, and since 2023 they have been appointed through a nominating committee. Check your own state's commission site rather than any roster, including ours. It takes a minute and it is the only answer that is current.

Search for "[your state] public service commission" or "[your state] public utilities commission". The commission's own site will say whether members are elected or appointed, and name them.

2. Look up who funds them

Elected commissioners file campaign disclosures with a state ethics or elections agency. Search "[your state] campaign finance search". Two traps, both of which we hit ourselves:

• States often split filings across several systems by date. Georgia uses three: one for 2005 to 2021, another for 2022 to 2025, and a third from 2026. Searching only the oldest returns nothing for recently elected officials and makes them look as though they never filed. If a sitting official appears to have no records, assume you are in the wrong system before you assume anything else.
• Names repeat. Two people in Georgia share a name, one a utility commissioner and one a candidate for a different office entirely. Every utility PAC contribution filed under that name belongs to the other man. Always confirm the office and district on the filing itself before attributing a single dollar to anyone. Getting this wrong is not a small error; it is a false statement about a real person.

3. Check what your state actually allows

Before concluding that a contribution is improper, read the statute. Rules differ enormously, and the version of a law circulating online is often the repealed one.

Georgia is the cautionary example. Search results and AI summaries widely quote a Georgia law flatly banning utility political contributions and making violations a felony. That text was repealed in 2011. The current law, O.C.G.A. § 21-5-30.1, bars a regulated utility from giving to the commissioners who regulate it, but subsection (d) expressly permits utility employees and officers to give from their own personal funds. That is why utility-executive money appears legally in Georgia filings, and a violation today is a misdemeanour, not a felony. Anyone arguing from the repealed version is arguing from a law that no longer exists.

The neatest way to see what a law does not cover: find the voluntary pledges reformers ask candidates to sign. In Georgia, one asks candidates to refuse money from regulated utilities and their affiliates, lobbyists and lawyers. That a pledge has to reach further than the statute tells you exactly where the statute stops.

4. Look up the advocacy groups, on both sides

Most groups arguing about data centers, for and against, are nonprofits that file a public tax return. Search the organisation's name in ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, which publishes IRS Form 990 filings. You will see the budget, the executives' pay, and sometimes the major donors.

Two honest limits. A 501(c)(4) does not have to name its donors, so the biggest money is often the hardest to trace; when a group will not say who funds it, that silence is itself worth reporting. And this only means something if you do it to your own side as readily as the other. A group that discloses everything is not thereby wrong, and a group that discloses nothing is not thereby lying.

A worked example: Georgia, where the money did not explain the votes

We ran this whole process on Georgia, which elects its five utility commissioners and which is deciding how a very large data center buildout gets paid for. The result was not what the exercise usually produces, which is exactly why it is worth showing.

Every decision was unanimous. Reading the Commission's own orders and releases, each data-center-related decision passed without a single dissent:

That is the finding, and it cuts against the premise. The usual shape of a follow-the-money story is that donations line up with how officials split. There was no split: not one dissent, across both parties, and across an election that replaced two of the five commissioners. Money cannot explain a pattern that never varies. We looked, and the honest answer is that the donor lists do not explain these votes.

What the decisions actually did also matters, and it is the part most likely to be left out by whichever side is quoting this. Georgia's rules make data centers pay their own upstream costs rather than spreading them across other customers, and put the risk on the utility rather than on households if the promised demand never arrives. Whatever you think of the buildout, that is the opposite of regulators handing the industry a blank cheque.

One thing the public record does show plainly. On 4 November 2025 Georgia voters replaced two of the five commissioners. On 19 December 2025, the outgoing commission certified 9,885 MW of new generation. The newly elected commissioners took office on 1 January 2026, twelve days later. Those are three dated public records. What you make of a board committing the state to nearly ten gigawatts in its final weeks is a judgement, and it is yours to make, not ours.

5. Handle other people's numbers carefully

Advocacy groups publish percentages like "87 percent of this official's money came from utility interests." Those figures usually rest on real filings, but the classification is the group's own, and it is typically broader than the law's definition: it may count law firms, lobbyists, retirees or any company with a perceived tie. Cite the filing, name the group when you use its percentage, and never present someone's categorisation as a legal finding.

News coverage makes ordinary mistakes too. The most-cited article on the Georgia race has the two districts swapped and the election date off by a day. Go to the state's own results page and the commission's own orders. They are not harder to read, and they are right.

Everything on this page came from state filings, commission orders and election results that anyone can open. Our own sources, with who funded each one, are on the sources page. When we get something wrong, it goes on the corrections page.