The day after Democrats won Congress, Bernie Sanders handed the new majority its marching orders. Enact a national moratorium on AI data centers. Pause advanced AI development. Ban superintelligence. “A moratorium on data centers is exactly what the American people want,” he said.
It isn’t. And the agenda behind it would do more damage to American power than any foreign rival has managed in a generation.
Not a little damage. Not damage at the margins. The kind you don’t recover from.
Americans Never Asked for This
Sanders rests his case on a poll showing that three in four Americans don’t want a data center built near their homes. People say the same thing about landfills, prisons and power plants. Not wanting one next door has never meant wanting Washington to outlaw an entire industry.
Ask voters the real question and the answer changes. Third Way, a Democratic think tank, found that voters don’t believe a construction ban would lower their electricity bills. They want tech companies to pay their own costs, not a shutdown. In Harwood, North Dakota, a town that already has a $3 billion data center going up, voters rejected a measure this week that would have made the next one harder to build. It wasn’t close.
Even his own party isn’t buying it. Most Democrats in Congress have refused to back the moratorium since he introduced it with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in March. If the American people were demanding this, Democrats would be falling over each other to sign on. They aren’t.
A Pause Designed Never to End
Read the bill. It halts construction and upgrades of every large AI data center until Congress passes sweeping AI legislation built to Sanders’s own checklist, including government approval of AI products before they can be released. Congress can’t pass a budget on time. The moratorium would last as long as Sanders wants it to.
His September bill with Rep. Greg Casar goes further. It bans superintelligence permanently and freezes advanced AI development until a federal regulator that doesn’t yet exist writes the rules. Every American lab stops work. No Chinese lab does.
And the moratorium bill bans exports of advanced American AI chips to countries without “similar protections.” That covers almost every customer American chipmakers have, allies included. Stop building here, stop selling abroad. That is the plan.
Beijing Wins, America Pays
The demand for computing power doesn’t vanish when Washington says no. Banks, drugmakers, defense contractors and hospitals will rent it wherever it’s built. As the analyst Daniel Newman put it this week, location is fungible. The servers go to the Gulf, to Southeast Asia and to China.
American and Chinese labs have swapped the lead at the top of the rankings more than once in the past two years. The race is that close. Sanders would hand China a head start of years and call it caution.
The cost lands at home. The electricians and pipefitters building these campuses in Texas, Ohio and Georgia lose their jobs first. Counties like Loudoun in Virginia, which have used data center tax money to hold down homeowners’ property taxes, lose that revenue. The grid upgrades data centers help pay for get billed to households instead.
This Is About Strength
Look at the whole Sanders program from this week. A wealth tax on the people who build companies. A freeze on the infrastructure. A halt to the research. A permanent ban on the frontier. Each one hits something America does better than anyone else on earth: capital, technology, innovation, scale.
That isn’t a coincidence. It’s a worldview that treats American success as a problem to be managed rather than an advantage to be defended. Sanders has spent decades distrusting the engines of American prosperity. Now he wants a new majority to switch the biggest one off.
I’m not a fan of Donald Trump. I’ve disagreed with plenty of what he’s done, and I expect to keep disagreeing. But when I listen to Bernie Sanders, I understand something I didn’t want to admit. Next to a plan to switch off American AI, Trump is the lesser evil.
Democrats won an election. They didn’t win a mandate to surrender the future.
Keep building.