As tech companies race to build new data centers across the country, Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to pump the brakes.
Sanders announced on Wednesday that he is introducing a bill in the Senate that would impose a national moratorium on the construction or upgrading of new AI data center projects until Congress passes AI legislation that “ensures the safety and prosperity of the American people.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is expected to introduce a companion bill in the House in the coming weeks.
“AI and robotics are going to bring cataclysmic changes to our society. Sadly, Congress has done virtually nothing,” Sanders wrote in a post on X today. “AI must work for working families, not the billionaires.”
The proposal comes as nearly every major tech company, including Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, is pouring billions into building out the infrastructure needed to train and run their competing AI models. Collectively, these companies are expected to spend at least $700 billion this year on AI infrastructure and development, according to CNBC.
At the same time, some of the communities where these projects are planned are already pushing back. Last year, Microsoft and Google withdrew a proposed data center project following local opposition tied to concerns about energy use, water consumption, and strain on power grids. Many local governments are also already exploring temporary restrictions on new data center development.
Those concerns are central to Sanders’s bill.
The legislation defines an AI data center as a facility used to develop or operate AI models at scale, or one with a peak power load exceeding 20 megawatts that relies on high-performance server racks or liquid cooling systems.
Under the proposal, the moratorium would remain in place until Congress passes laws that meet a set of conditions. Those include requiring government review and approval of AI systems before their release, ensuring that data centers do not raise electricity prices or worsen climate change, and putting policies in place to prevent job displacement. The bill also calls for the economic gains from AI to be shared with the American people.
The chances of a proposal like this becoming law appear pretty slim under the current administration. President Donald Trump, who tech CEOs have spent the past year cozying up to, signed an executive order in December limiting what his administration described as overly burdensome state-level AI regulations in the name of national and economic security.
Rep. Cortez addressed a question about whether slowing down AI projects could give China an advantage during a press conference for the legislation today.
“Once these companies can be on the up and up, providing their own energy, building out and investing in the infrastructure, refusing to free ride off of the American people, then we can continue to develop and explore this technology,” Cortez said. “I don’t think that this is about a denialism of science or American competitiveness.”
On the same day Sanders unveiled his bill, Trump also named several major tech leaders, such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, to his new Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Still, it looks like Sanders won’t be backing down anytime soon. While he doesn’t always get the details right, Sanders is among the few national lawmakers consistently raising alarms about the impacts of AI. That’s a bit shocking when you consider the fact that a recent NBC poll found that AI is less popular than ICE, and a separate poll recently found that voters say AI is a more important election issue than guns, climate change, child care, gas prices, and abortion.
He also isn’t afraid to challenge wealthy tech leaders. During the press conference with Rep. Cortez, Sanders quoted remarks made by Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Microsoft CEO Mustafa Suleyman about how AI would replace most jobs.
And earlier this week, Sanders called on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to testify before Congress over reports that he is seeking to raise $100 billion for a fund aimed at acquiring manufacturing companies and using AI to accelerate automation.
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