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June 25, 2026
Have data centers become the hottest topic in Montana politics? Democrats seem to think so.
The Montana Democratic Party emerged from its June 20 platform convention in Billings with a plank supporting a two-year moratorium on data center projects, which involve hundreds or thousands of computer servers processing data in service of everything from artificial intelligence to bitcoin mining. Democrats’ concerns with the facilities are primarily aligned around the prospect of rising power bills driven by data centers’ energy demands and scarcity of the water necessary to keep them cool.
Data center facilities have ridden a boom-bust cycle in Montana for about a decade, with faltering projects in Bonner, Butte and Hardin, but interest has recently surged alongside the data-processing demands of artificial intelligence.
Planned data centers have become larger both in their geographic footprint and in the scale of their power consumption. One project proposed by Quantica east of Broadview suggests its electricity demand could be greater than that of the entire Montana customer base of NorthWestern Energy, the state’s largest monopoly utility. The proposed Quantica complex is five square miles.
Broadview is a small rural town 32 miles northwest of Billings. It was the Yellowstone County Democrats who introduced the 2-year moratorium at last weekend’s platform convention.
By Wednesday, former Democratic Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer had organized a seminar on the subject with Montana Conservation Voters.
“Nationwide data centers have a 30% approval rating. In Montana, they have a 22% approval rating,” Schweitzer told his Zoom audience. “That’s lower than almost everything, anything that you can look at. I think every issue that I have looked at, no matter what it has to do with, education or health care, I can’t find any as low as 22%. So the public is already on our side.”
The former governor said the data center issue reminds him of a crisis 26 years ago: deregulation of the Montana Power Company, which was pitched as creating savings for consumers, but turned out to do the opposite.
Then and now, Democrats were short on legislative power. The party had also lost its fourth gubernatorial election in a row. And party members were staking positions on both sides of the issue.
“They need to start talking about what they’re for and not what they’re against,” former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester said of state Democrats on the Sunday Night with Chuck Todd program on Noosphere. “I will just tell you that the data center thing is a prime example. AI is coming, whether we do it or China does it, it’s coming. The amount of water they use is concerning, the amount of electricity they use is concerning, both of those can be mitigated, but just saying no is not an answer.”
The Montana Republican Party also amended its platform in June to address data centers, stating that local governments should participate in decisions about “data centers, wind farms and solar farms.” The Quantica project suggests it might involve all three.
Later in the platform, the MTGOP states that any development “must respect the limits of our Western water and energy resources, [and] protect existing communities, agriculture, and industry.”
Building trades unions, a key source of support for both major parties, are eager for the work that data center construction would bring.
—Tom Lutey
New Rules for Republicans
After a bitter primary election in which Republican Party hardliners and centrists spent millions of dollars battling each other, MTGOP earlier this month adopted new bylaws aimed at tightening party membership rules and disciplining members deemed by party leaders to be out of step with party principles.
The bylaws were amended June 13 and posted publicly in June.
Members must now, for the first time, complete a registration form affirming support for the party and pay annual dues. The new bylaws include a new process for suspending or terminating membership “for cause,” though the bylaws don’t list specific grounds for such disciplinary action.
Fissures in the party date back at least to the 2025 Legislature, when centrist Republicans worked with minority-party Democratic lawmakers and Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte to pass a balanced budget and other key legislation.
The centrist coalition appeared to mostly survive the primary, and its Democratic members could gain an additional seat in the state Senate in November 2026, the second cycle of elections using Senate districts redrawn after the 2020 U.S. census.
The new bylaws also apply to Republican precinct committeemen and committeewomen. Recent county-level appointments have drawn attention in Cascade, Flathead and Yellowstone counties, where new precinct committee members will take office sometime after the state’s June 22 primary election canvass. In Flathead County, more than 50 new precinct people have been elected amid dissatisfaction with the local party’s level of engagement in recent nonpartisan local government elections, including the Kalispell mayor’s race.
In June, county party leadership endorsed an unsuccessful challenger to incumbent Flathead County Sheriff Brian Heino, a popular Republican who won more than 80% of the vote.
—Tom Lutey
