Kansas Senate candidate Adam Hamilton is running against the AI data center boom while holding up to $3.5 million in the very companies building it — and ordinary Kansans are left to wonder which version of the millionaire pastor would show up in Washington.
Hamilton, a Methodist minister challenging Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, told Politico earlier this month that the U.S. government should help "slow down" AI development and create "the right solutions and safeguards." In a July statement, he opposed "giving tax breaks to massive corporations building data centers in our communities that can drive up energy costs and drain our water supply."
His financial disclosures tell a different story. Hamilton's net worth runs as high as $20 million, according to his June filing with the Senate. Up to $3.5 million sits in cloud and data center operators — including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle. Another $126,000 to $430,000 is parked in chipmakers NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Broadcom. He bought an additional $12,000 to $180,000 in other data center infrastructure companies. His single largest holding: more than $7 million in Apple stock.
In 2025 alone, Hamilton collected a $394,239 salary from the megachurch he founded, Church of Resurrection, plus another $417,372 in publishing royalties. His wife reported income from foreign bonds — $5,001 to $15,000 from the state-owned Bank of China and $15,001 to $50,000 from India's government-controlled Bank Baroda. Both have since been sold off. It's unclear what prompted the purchases or the sale.
Hamilton has tried to have it both ways, telling localities they should decide on data centers themselves: "If a town decides a project is worth it to land the jobs or increase their tax base, that's their decision. But if they don't want one, that should be their decision, too." He added: "If you're a data center, you should pay your own way."
The populist posture rings hollow when the same companies he says should "pay their own way" are the ones paying him. And the data center buildout he's hedging against is already hitting real-world walls. Microsoft just walked away from a $2.7 billion AI data center project in Loughton, England, after learning the site won't get grid power until the 2030s, the Daily Caller reported. In the U.S., projects seeking connection to the PJM grid now face waits of more than eight years on average, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute. The infrastructure can't keep up with the hype — and communities bearing the energy and water costs are the ones left holding the bag.
Marshall, for his part, has also voiced concerns about data centers, telling Semafor his constituents are "on fire against" them and supporting local moratoriums. But his own AI-adjacent investments are a fraction of Hamilton's — tens of thousands of shares in funds with some AI exposure, against a net worth between $3 million and $9 million.
The New York Post framed the story as Hamilton "running away" from the AI boom he helped enable; the Daily Caller focused on the infrastructure collapse undermining that boom from the other side of the Atlantic. The thread connecting them: the same tech giants Hamilton profits from can't even keep the lights on for their own projects.
Hamilton wants to regulate AI and tax data centers on the stump while his portfolio bets on their growth. The question for Kansas voters isn't whether AI needs guardrails — it's whether a candidate with millions riding on the outcome can be trusted to build them.
