Today, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act. The bill would halt all new data center construction in the United States until Congress passes federal legislation protecting workers, consumers, the environment, and civil rights.
We want to be clear about something before we say anything else: the concerns behind this bill are real. The people pushing it are not stupid. They are responding to genuine pain, genuine displacement, and genuine failures of governance that have left communities holding the bag while tech companies post record earnings.
This matters. Because what we're about to say next is going to sound like we don't care about any of that, and that's not true.
We care about it enough to tell the truth about it: the Moratorium Act is a concession speech. It concedes the future to whoever keeps building while America pauses. And the people who will pay the highest price for that concession are the same workers and communities the bill claims to protect.
The bill didn't materialize from nowhere. It grew from real backlash in real places.
Denver imposed a moratorium on new data centers last month after residents raised alarms about water consumption, electricity costs, and land use. New Orleans did the same. Madison, Wisconsin. Communities across Georgia, Michigan, Virginia. New York State proposed a three-year ban on new permits. More than a dozen states have pending legislation.
In Virginia, data centers already consume 25% of the state's electricity. EPRI projects that could hit 57% by 2030. Electricity demand nationally has been growing at 1.7% annually since 2020, after more than a decade of flat growth, driven almost entirely by data centers. The EIA projects 1.9% growth in 2026, 2.5% in 2027. In Texas, wholesale power prices could jump 79% under high-demand scenarios.
These are not imaginary numbers. If you live near a data center and your electric bill doubled, you're not being irrational when you show up at a city council meeting angry. If your town's aquifer is being drained to cool servers while your lawn dies under water restrictions, the rage is proportional.
Sanders said it plainly: "We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity."
He's right about the problem. He's catastrophically wrong about the solution.
Here is the core error of the Moratorium Act, and it's a game theory error, which means it's the kind of mistake where good intentions produce the worst possible outcome.
A moratorium is a unilateral move in a multiplayer game. The United States pauses. Everyone else doesn't.
This is not hypothetical. It is already happening.
ByteDance is budgeted to spend $160 billion on data center infrastructure in 2026 alone. China's hyperscalers had $400 billion in budgeted capex for 2025, constrained only by chip export restrictions and a lack of domestic substitutes — constraints that are eroding. Goldman Sachs projects China's top internet firms will invest over $70 billion next year. China's data center electricity capacity is on track to hit 30 gigawatts, up 30% year over year. ByteDance just broke ground on a $614 million AI data center in Shanxi province.
Globally, the 14 largest data center operators are spending close to $750 billion in 2026. Over 23 gigawatts of capacity is under construction at 831 sites worldwide. Three-quarters of it is in the US — for now.
The Moratorium Act doesn't pause the global buildout. It pauses America's share of it. The rest of the world continues at full speed. The math is immediate and brutal:
Axios put it bluntly: "Data center projects could be potentially on hold for years under the Sanders-AOC bill, as Congress is far from passing any AI legislation, let alone anything the two Democrats would consider 'strong.'"
This is the prisoner's dilemma, and we've written about it before. The dilemma doesn't reward the player who opts out. It punishes them. The only winning move is to keep playing while changing the rules of the game — not to forfeit and hope everyone else follows your example.
Nobody is going to follow this example.
We made this argument in February, and the Moratorium Act is exactly the kind of legislation we warned about. The bill conflates a technology with its externalities.
Water use is a zoning and resource allocation problem. Energy costs are a grid planning and procurement problem. Job displacement is a labor policy and economic distribution problem. Environmental impacts are a permitting problem. Community disruption is a local governance problem.
Every single one of these problems exists independent of AI. Crypto mining data centers use the same electricity. Manufacturing plants use the same water. Offshoring displaced millions of jobs before GPT existed. The externalities are real. The bill targets the wrong variable.
Pausing data center construction does not solve the water problem in Arizona. It does not fix the grid in Texas. It does not retrain a single displaced worker. It does not lower anyone's electricity bill. It does not give communities better tools for negotiating with developers.
What it does is let Congress perform concern without doing the hard work of governing.
Here's where the rebuke lands hardest, because this is where the bill's logic turns against the people it claims to serve.
The argument for the moratorium assumes that slowing AI development protects workers. The opposite is true. The only realistic path to broad economic improvement — the only one that doesn't require a political miracle — is through abundance. And abundance requires acceleration, not deceleration.
Let's be specific about what acceleration actually means in practice.
Intelligence is getting cheaper. Rapidly. DeepSeek built a frontier-competitive model for a fraction of what OpenAI spent. Open-weight models run on commodity hardware. The cost of inference drops every quarter. This is deflationary pressure on the cost of knowledge work, and it has already started to spread into the cost of goods and services that depend on knowledge work — which is nearly everything.
If intelligence continues to get cheaper, here is what follows:
This is not speculation. This is the observable trajectory. Every week, the capabilities increase and the costs decrease. The question is not whether this happens. The question is whether America is the place where it happens, or the place that watches it happen somewhere else.
The moratorium answers that question: somewhere else.
We genuinely believe Sanders and AOC are acting from conviction. Sanders has spent fifty years fighting for workers. AOC has been one of the few members of Congress willing to name the structural problems — wealth concentration, regulatory capture, corporate power — that most politicians pretend don't exist. Their diagnosis is often correct.
But a correct diagnosis with the wrong prescription is still malpractice.
The moratorium doesn't redistribute power. It doesn't give workers ownership of AI tools. It doesn't build community-owned infrastructure. It doesn't fund transition programs. It doesn't break up monopolies. It doesn't create open alternatives to proprietary systems.
It pauses building. That's it. And in a game where every other player keeps building, pausing is losing.
The bill is designed to "give democracy a chance to catch up." But Congress has had years to catch up. They haven't. Not because the timeline is too fast, but because the incentive structures don't reward catching up. The companies with the most resources write the rules that benefit them. Regulatory capture is the norm. A moratorium doesn't fix that dynamic. It just extends the window during which nothing gets done while the rest of the world sprints ahead.
If the goal is to protect workers and communities while maintaining the infrastructure advantage that gives you leverage to set global norms, here is what that looks like:
For energy and water: Require transparent resource disclosure from all data center operators. Set renewable energy procurement minimums. Tie permits to demonstrated infrastructure capacity — not promises, capacity. Fund grid upgrades in high-demand regions. Use data center tax revenue to subsidize residential electricity rates in affected communities. None of this requires a moratorium. It requires local and federal governments doing their jobs.
For workers: This is the hard one. The honest answer is that the economic system was already failing most people before AI accelerated the timeline. The moratorium doesn't address this because you can't solve a labor distribution crisis by pausing a technology. What you can do: fund transition programs that aren't jokes. Explore automation dividends. Build pathways for workers to capture AI productivity gains directly — through ownership of tools, not dependence on platforms. Invest in the infrastructure of individual capability, not the bureaucracy of collective restriction.
For power concentration: Open source. Open weights. Local inference. Fund public compute infrastructure. Support models that run on commodity hardware without phoning home to a platform. Every model that runs locally is a structural check on monopoly power. This is escape velocity — the thesis we've been building on since day one. You break free from technofeudalism not by asking the feudal lords to pause, but by building infrastructure they don't control.
For communities: Give municipalities real tools to negotiate with developers. Require community benefit agreements. Fund independent environmental impact assessments. Create model ordinances that other cities can adopt. The communities fighting data center expansion aren't wrong to fight — they're just using the only weapon available to them because nobody gave them better ones.
We keep coming back to this because it keeps being true: you cannot opt out of the future. You can only choose whether you shape it or get shaped by it.
The Moratorium Act is an attempt to opt out. It's framed as caution. It's framed as democratic deliberation. It's framed as standing up to Big Tech oligarchs. And at the level of intention, all of that may be sincere.
But intentions don't determine outcomes. Incentive structures do. And the incentive structure here is unforgiving: the rest of the world is not going to wait for Congress to finish debating. China is not pausing. The UAE is not pausing. The capital is mobile, the talent is mobile, and the technology is math — it doesn't respect borders or moratoriums.
The path to abundance runs through acceleration, not restriction. Through building, not banning. Through distributing capability as widely as possible, as fast as possible, so that the gains don't concentrate in the hands of a few companies — which is the very outcome Sanders and AOC are trying to prevent.
A moratorium doesn't distribute anything. It just creates a vacuum. And vacuums get filled by whoever keeps moving.
The intent is good. The outcome is surrender.
The only way out is through.
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