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Data center supporters have spent more than $22 million on campaign contributions in Florida ahead of the 2026 elections, according to a new Seeking Rents analysis of state fundraising data.
Roughly a quarter of that money — around $5.8 million — has been spent boosting Byron Donalds, the Republican Congressman from Naples who is the heavy favorite to win the GOP nomination for governor in next month’s primary elections.
Billionaire artificial intelligence investors, who depend on data center computing power, have put $3 million into a state committee paying for advertisements touting Donalds. The parent company of utility giant Florida Power & Light, which is building a network of gigawatt-scale data center hubs that it will supply with electricity, has donated $1 million to Donald’s personal political committee. People and companies connected to an AI data center proposed in Palm Beach County have given Donalds at least $375,000.
Donalds became the GOP frontrunner thanks to an endorsement from President Donald Trump, who has called data centers “money machines” and “LIQUID GOLD!” and encouraged states to build more of them.
And though he has since begun to backtrack, Donalds himself has also been far more open to data center development in Florida than other major candidates, Republican or Democrat, in the race to replace outgoing Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Data centers are going to be a function of American life going forward, the more you use technology, the more server space you’re going to need,” Donalds said in March, during a meeting with students at Florida Gulf Coast University. “I think when it comes to technology, AI and everything else, Florida should lead.”
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Data center interests have also poured money into Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature.
The top individual recipient: Sen. Jim Boyd, a Republican from Bradenton who is about to become president of the Florida Senate. Boyd has raised more than $375,000 from companies involved in data center development — via five- and six-figure gifts from Duke Energy, Meta Platforms and Timberline Real Estate Partners, among others.
The industry’s investment in Tallahassee has already paid dividends.
DeSantis and the Legislature enacted a law earlier this year setting a variety of new rules and regulations around data centers. But industry lobbyists persuaded lawmakers to defang much of the package the before they passed it.
Early drafts of the legislation would have banned non-disclosure agreements between data center developers and government agencies; eliminated tax incentives for the industry; and prohibited construction of a data center within five miles of any home or school unless approved by a unanimous vote of the local county commission or city council.
Each of those provisions was removed before DeSantis signed the bill into law.
Florida’s data center donors
Altogether, Seeking Rents identified more than a dozen companies connected to the data center industry that have made $10,000 or more in state-level campaign contributions in Florida since the start of the 2026 election cycle.
Now, before we go any further, I should probably take a moment to explain who I’m counting as a “data center supporter.” Because the industry can be a bit amorphous.
Some companies are obvious: Big Tech “hyperscalers” like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft; artificial intelligence companies and investors like OpenAI and the financiers at Andreessen Horowitz; and electric utilities like Florida Power & Light, Duke and TECO.
But there is also an entire constellation of landowners, developers, suppliers and others who are often the driving force behind a specific data center development — but who may otherwise be largely unconnected to the industry.
For instance, New Jersey-based Ferreira Construction and Maryland-based Stonebridge Associates are both broad commercial-real estate companies. But both have also been linked to massive data center proposals in Florida — the now-withdrawn “Silver Fox” project in Indiantown and a still-advancing 1,300-acre facility in Fort Meade.
(Quick shoutout here to Emily Mahoney of the Tampa Bay Times, who has been owning the data center beat and who put together an indispensable map of projects around the state.)
Then there’s Rayonier Inc., which is one of the top timber companies in the country. Rayonier is also among the largest private landowners in Florida and an increasingly important real-estate developer in the state. And the company is actively pursuing data center projects.
“We’ve definitely seen interest in land purchases from data center developers, and we continue to focus on trying to build out some of those opportunities,” Rayonier President and CEO Mark McHugh told Wall Street analysts in May.
That’s why you see Rayonier on this list.
I’ve also included Phillips Inc., a major infrastructure contractor in Tennessee that works on everything from airports to water reservoirs, and Palm Beach Aggregates, a rock-mining firm in south Florida.
The reason? Executives from the two companies are part of the development group behind the proposed data center in Palm Beach County known as “Project Tango. The local county commission just rejected the project, although though the battle may not be over.
On the other hand, I have not included Florida Crystals — even though the Big Sugar producer reportedly co-owns Palm Beach Aggregates. Florida Crystals is one of the top corporate contributors in all of Florida politics, and adding them to this dataset could unfairly distort the totals.
The point is that this whole exercise is, admittedly, somewhat subjective. Your mileage may vary on where exactly to draw these lines.
The power of the power companies
Speaking of distorting the totals, one thing immediately stands out on the list of data center donors in Florida.
Two out of every three dollars comes from the state’s big corporate power companies: NextEra Energy, the parent company of Florida Power & Light; Duke Energy; and TECO, also known as Tampa Electric Co.
FPL, Duke and TECO are regulated monopolies, which means that their profits are, ultimately, controlled by state politicians and political appointees in Tallahassee. So the three companies spend millions every year contributing to elected officials and lobbying them on a wide rang of issues, from tax breaks to climate policy to the selection of the regulators who decide their rate cases.
But the electric utilities are driving data center development just as much as the Big Tech and AI firms. In December, for instance, NextEra announced a deal with Google to build a network of gigawatt-scale data center campuses across the country.
Harry Sideris, the president and CEO of Duke Energy, recently told Wall Street analysts that Duke is aggressively pursuing data center customers, too. “We have a team in place that their goal — seven days a week, 24 hours a day — is, ‘How do we get these things signed quicker?’” he said during a company earnings call in May.
“We have a lot of interest in Florida,” Sideris added.
The monopoly utilities also lobbied on the new data center law Ron DeSantis recently signed.
No one from FPL ever publicly testified on the legislation as it moved though the Legislature. But the company was buttonholing lawmakers behind closed doors — urging them to support a more milquetoast version of the bill filed in the Florida Senate over a far more aggressive proposal pushed by the state House.
That’s according to FPL President and CEO Scott Bores, who shared the company’s lobbying strategy with investment analysts during a quarterly earnings call while Florida lawmakers were still in session.
“There are two pieces of legislation out there — one by the House, one by the Senate. The Senate is the one that’s advanced already through a committee and, I will say, is the more constructive legislation,” Bores said on the Jan. 27 conference call. “And so we are going to continue to support that legislation as it advances.”
The AI billionaires
The other dominant donor so far is a federal Super PAC called “Leading the Future.”
It’s financed largely by three data center-backing billionaires: AI investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; and Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of OpenAI, which owns the ChatGPT chatbot.
Leading the Future put $3 million earlier this year into a new state political committee called American Mission Florida. American Mission Florida has used the money for a barrage of advertisements promoting Byron Donalds, the frontrunner in the Republican primary for governor.
The Miami Herald reported earlier this month that the organization had already sponsored roughly 1,700 television spots touting Donalds’ endorsement from President Donald Trump. NBC News reported earlier this year that the AI titans were prepared to spend as much as $5 million on Donalds’ behalf.
“Byron Donalds understands we’re on the cusp of a magical era of technological advancement that will unleash enormous economic benefits and protect Florida’s future, and that’s why we’re proud to support him for Governor,” a strategist for Leading the Future told NBC News at the time.
Meta rising
There’s another company that stands out among Florida’s data center donors: Meta Platforms.
For as big a corporation as it is, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram has historically been a modest campaign contributor at the state level — especially when compared to the top corporate donors like the utilities.
But that may be changing.
In April, Meta suddenly began cutting sizable checks to key figures in the Florida Legislature. The burst of donations included a $25,000 gift to Sen. Jim Boyd, the Bradenton Republican who is about to become Senate president — plus $10,000 each to future Senate presidents Jay Trumbull (R-Panama City) and Tom Leek (R-Palm Coast) and future House speakers Jennifer Canady (R-Lakeland) and Mike Redondo (R-Miami).
It appears to be part of a nationwide strategic shift for the company, which plans to spend up to $65 million this year supporting state-level politicians it deems “friendly” to AI, according to a February report in the New York Times.
Some of Meta’s state-level campaign spending is being routed through company-controlled PACs with otherwise innocuous names.
One, called “Forge the Future Project,” is specifically for Republican candidates and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in GOP primaries in Georgia, among other states.
Another, called “Making Our Tomorrow,” is just for Democrats and has been active in Democratic primaries in states like Illinois.
Money in a bundle
Data center supporters don’t always write one big check to a candidate. Sometimes they bundle lots of smaller ones together.
A good example of this is Timberline Real Estate Partners, a data center developer whose projects include “Sentinel Grove,” a $13.5 billion hyperscale facility proposed in rural St. Lucie County that has been halted by public backlash — at least for now.
Records show that Byron Donalds has raised $70,000 from nearly two dozen people and corporate entities connected to Timberline — including 21 different donations, for $3,000 each, all deposited on the same day last month.
This kind of bundling can make it difficult to trace the full extent of the money that data center interests are pouring into Florida politics. But it’s important to remember, particularly if you go digging through the campaign finance repots for your local city and county candidates, whose fundraising isn’t included in these totals.
And it’s those mayors, commissioners and council members who ultimately decide whether or not to approve a data center in your area.
So where is all this money going?
Here are the top 10 recipients of data center money, according to my analysis:
Every politician on this list is a Republican. That’s probably not a surprise; the Florida GOP controls the Governor’s Office, the entire statewide Cabinet and supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature.
But there are some Florida Democrats taking data center money, too.
In fact, the Florida Democratic Party and the Democrats’ House and Senate leadership committees have taken a combined $570,000 from data center interests. Most of that money came from Florida Power & Light and Duke, though Amazon and Oracle were substantial donors, too.
Among individual candidates, Byron Donalds is the biggest individual beneficiary by far — especially when you remember that the money put into the “American Mission Florida” political committee is being spent supporting Donalds’ campaign for governor.
But taken together, Senate Republicans aren’t all that far behind him. The Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, incoming Senate President Jim Boyd and outgoing Senate President Ben Albritton have raised more $3 million combined from data center interests.
Some of that is the influence of FPL, Duke and TECO on these numbers. The utility companies try to keep a tight grip on the 40-member Florida Senate, which is responsible for confirming or rejecting the governor’s appointments to the Public Service Commission — the state agency that the utility companies come to when they want to raise electricity rates.
I should mention that these totals are missing some money — quite a lot, probably.
Why? Because, thanks to Florida’s porous fundraising reporting deadlines, the state’s political parties and legislative leadership committees haven’t had to disclose any of their donors since the end of March. And they won’t have to again until mid-August.
That is a big blank space on this map. And it won’t be filled in until less than a week before the Aug. 18 primary election.
Hiding behind brand launderers
As you can see, the companies pushing data centers in Florida filter much of their political spending through intermediaries — particularly Associated Industries of Florida and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the state’s biggest business-lobbying groups.
Google, for example, has already spent a quarter of a million dollars on Florida campaign contributions so far in the 2026 election cycle. But Google has put all of that money into a political committee controlled by AIF, which can then turn around and distribute the company’s cash to specific candidates.
AIF and the Chamber also run this kind of cover in Tallahassee. Virtually all of the public lobbying against this year’s data center legislation, for instance, came from AIF, the Chamber and other brand-laundering business groups and think tanks.
“Data centers can be a major economic driver here in Florida,” Florida Chamber lobbyist Colton Madill said during a House committee hearing on the legislation.
“We see a lot of benefits of these coming to the states,” AIF lobbyist Adam Basford added during another legislative committee meeting.
Obviously, channeling campaign contributions through intermediaries like AIF and the Chamber makes it all-but-impossible to trace the money down to the candidate level. But keep the scheme in mind if you try to look up the data center donors to candidates on your ballot.
You might not see Google in their contribution reports. But you may see Associated Industries.
And they’re pretty much the same thing at this point.
Lots of interest in the AI industry's potential influence on Byron Donalds and the FL Legislative leaders. Would LOVE to see an update of the data pull you shared July 21, since there have been more filings since then. Would you consider an update? Soon?
So where did the other 3/4 of this money go?? WHICH DEMOCRATS ARE GETTING MONEY FROM THESE PEOPLE?