New reporting from NBC News reveals DC insider and Big Utility lobbyist Michael Whatley – who has up to $1.5 million invested in the data center industry, including Duke Energy – supports tax breaks for data centers and claimed the public backlash to data centers is “not organic.”

North Carolinians have been speaking out against data centers for months and voicing concern over rising energy costs – all while Whatley personally profits. 

Whatley is siding with data centers over North Carolinians to spike his stock portfolio and benefit his bottom line.

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NBC News: Republicans wrestle with data center backlash as Trump promotes the benefits

Allan Smith | August 24, 2026

• As recently as last month, Republicans in some of this fall’s biggest races publicly expressed skepticism about the growing backlash to data center development.

• “This opposition to data centers is not organic,” Michael Whatley, the GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina, told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade in an interview last month, later agreeing that governments should offer developers tax breaks but not subsidies to encourage their expansion. “This is being ginned up the same way that we saw opposition to energy projects around the country.”

• In North Carolina, Democrats are similarly taking aim at Whatley, who once worked as a utility industry lobbyist and has investments in companies that could benefit from data center growth, per his personal financial disclosure. 

• In a statement, a spokesperson for Roy Cooper, the former governor and current Democratic Senate nominee, accused Whatley of “shilling for his former client Duke Energy to benefit his own bank account instead of standing up against utility rate hikes that are crushing North Carolinians.”

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