Strange bedfellows: Kreiss-Tomkins, heavily funded by AI executives, now calls for Alaska data center moratorium

By SUZANNE DOWNING

July 23, 2026 – Alaska Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has received more than half a million dollars from artificial intelligence and technology executives. That was reported by The Alaska Story this week.

Now, suddenly he is proposing a statewide moratorium on the infrastructure that makes the AI industry possible.

He is being largely untouched on this point by the lagging Republican candidates for governor, who are busy attacking the lead Republican in the race.

Kreiss-Tomkins has now unveiled a platform calling for an immediate halt to all new data centers in Alaska until the Legislature adopts what he describes as comprehensive regulations governing their development.

The proposal presents a remarkable political contrast for the former Sitka legislator: AI-industry donors have supplied more than 28% of the approximately $1.85 million raised by his campaign.

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Six people associated with Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company behind the Claude artificial intelligence platform, contributed a combined $372,000. That is roughly one-fifth of all the money Kreiss-Tomkins has raised.

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His broader group of AI-connected donors contributed at least $521,812, according to an Alaska Story analysis of his campaign finance disclosure. Most of that large-dollar technology money came from California and other states.

The donations are from individual executives and employees, not directly from the corporations that employ them. But the concentration is unusual in an Alaska governor’s race, particularly for a candidate who is now campaigning on restricting the physical expansion of the industry from which so much of his financial support originated.

“Across Alaska, Alaskans are concerned about data center development, while our state government has taken no steps to pass regulation or protect Alaskans,” Kreiss-Tomkins said in announcing the proposal. “We need a moratorium on all data centers until regulation can be passed.”

The campaign said Kreiss-Tomkins would require local approval for future projects and prevent data centers from increasing residential electric rates or receiving subsidies from Alaskans.

His platform also proposes holding AI companies liable in Alaska courts for harm caused by their products, prohibiting deepfakes, requiring disclosure when AI is used in political advertising, targeting AI-enabled fraud and voice cloning, imposing protections for children and requiring a human being to remain responsible for every state government decision.

Some of those provisions address concerns that cross party lines. The moratorium, however, would potentially block a new economic sector just as investors and the federal government are examining Alaska as a location for major data infrastructure.

Alaska has several natural advantages for data centers: enormous amounts of available land, abundant natural gas and water, a cold climate that can substantially reduce cooling requirements and a geographic position between North America and fast-growing Asian markets. The state also has significant military installations and expanding fiber-optic connections.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Center for Energy and Power has identified Alaska’s cold climate and access to Asia-Pacific markets as potential advantages. It has also noted that a large commercial electric customer could help spread fixed utility costs across a broader customer base, although Alaska’s high electricity prices and limited transmission system remain obstacles.

A proposed $500 million AI and cloud-computing center on the North Slope would operate independently from the Railbelt electric grid and generate power from North Slope natural gas. The developer, Stak Energy, has said the cold climate could allow the project to use substantially less water than comparable Lower 48 facilities. The proposal has received preliminary state approval for a land lease but remains in its early stages.

The Department of the Air Force has separately invited companies to propose as many as 12 AI data centers on 4,700 acres at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Eielson Air Force Base and Clear Space Force Station. Under that initiative, developers would be responsible for financing, permitting, construction and long-term operations.

Data centers can require enormous quantities of electricity, and some designs use significant amounts of water for cooling. Communities in the Lower 48 have raised legitimate concerns about residential rate increases, new power-generation costs, noise and whether the relatively small number of permanent jobs justifies the public resources involved.

China, in particular, would also be very opposed to data centers in Alaska, since it is overcoming America in the AI sector.

But those questions can be addressed through project-specific permitting, dedicated power-generation requirements and agreements shielding existing utility customers from additional costs. Kreiss-Tomkins’ proposal instead begins with a statewide prohibition covering every new data center, regardless of location, size, power source or connection to a public electric grid.

It is also unclear whether a governor could impose such a sweeping moratorium without legislative authorization, or whether the proposal would affect projects on federal military property.

Kreiss-Tomkins’ campaign described Alaska as being “behind” Democratic-led New York and California and Republican-led Florida because it lacks statewide regulations specifically targeting AI and data centers.

Before running for governor, Kreiss-Tomkins worked for several years in national science and technology policy. His campaign says he supported national AI regulation in that role.

His donor list shows that he also developed an extraordinary financial network inside the industry. Anthropic-linked donors alone supplied more money to his campaign than many Alaska gubernatorial candidates have raised altogether.

That leaves Kreiss-Tomkins attempting a difficult political balancing act involving truthfulness, as he is accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the people building the AI economy while promising Alaska voters that he will put the brakes on the infrastructure that powers it.