Orange County mayoral candidates share concerns about large AI data centers

Election Day 2026 is just days away.Voters in Orange County will be choosing a new mayor for the first time in eight years.Chris Messina and Tiffany Moore Russell are running to replace Jerry Demings. [ELECTION 2026: Make sure you’re eligible to vote|How to vote by mail|Election Myths]It comes as AI and data centers are becoming hot-button political issues.News 6 anchor Lisa Bell asked both Messina and Moore Russell their views on data centers moving into Orange County.MOORE RUSSELL: So I think that’s a very general term, right? Because data centers vary based upon the size and their purpose, right. So at the clerk’s office, there’s a smaller version of that that houses our data, because we’re now in the cloud. We don’t have paper anymore in the courthouse, right, so someone is housing our digital court records. But I do not support the big data centers, the AI data centers that is being proposed today. And so I did commend the county for pushing for a moratorium just to pause. Allows