Bernie Sanders and AOC are pushing a moratorium on data center construction

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) will introduce a bill Wednesday that aims to put a national moratorium on data center construction “until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will introduce a similar bill in the House in the coming weeks.

While it’s highly unlikely that the bill will pass—especially given the Trump administration’s full-throated endorsement of AI, and the massive amount of money the industry is set to spend this year in Washington—the bill marks a new line in the sand for progressives seeking to address both concern around data center construction and the potential harms artificial intelligence may bring.

“A moratorium will give us the chance to figure out how to make sure that AI benefits the working families of this country, not just a handful of billionaires who want more and more wealth and more and more power,” Sanders said in a speech on the Hill Tuesday evening. “A moratorium will give us the time to figure out how to ensure that AI is safe and effective and prevent the worst outcomes. A moratorium will give us the time to figure out how to make sure AI does not harm our environment or jack up the electric bills that we pay.”

Sanders’s bill puts an open-ended moratorium on the construction or upgrading of new and existing data centers used specifically for artificial intelligence—defined in the bill via a series of physical parameters, including energy load above 20 megawatts. The moratorium, the bill states, will end only when laws are enacted that not only prevent data centers from contributing to climate change, harming the environment, and raising electricity bills, but also prevent tech companies from producing products that displace harm the “health and well-being of working families, privacy and civil rights, and the future of humanity.” Tech companies, the bill states, must ensure that wealth generated from AI is “shared with the people of the United States.” (A separate section forbids the export of computing hardware, including semiconductor chips, to any country that does not have similar laws.)

The bill name-checks wealthy tech executives, including xAI’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who have both profited greatly from artificial intelligence and sounded alarms at just how quickly the technology could change society.

The urgent push to build out data centers across the US has ignited a wave of opposition over concerns about higher electric bills, water use, energy impacts, and land rights. Recent polling from Pew shows that nearly 40 percent of Americans believe that data centers are bad for the environment and home energy costs, while 30 percent say that they have a negative impact on quality of life for people living nearby.

Public opposition to data centers, and the high energy bills they could cause, has played a role in elections in states like Virginia and Georgia, where data center development has accelerated in recent years. Last year, a report found that $98 billion in data center projects had been stalled or canceled due to community pushback in the second quarter of 2025 alone.

In December, Sanders became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data centers, days after a coalition of more than 230 progressive groups sent a letter to Congress calling for a national moratorium. The letter claimed that “rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security.”

Dozens of cities and counties across the US have introduced local moratoria on data center development in response to local pushback. At least a dozen state legislatures—in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—have introduced state-level moratoriums this year.

But Sanders’s bill marks a significant departure from many of these pieces of legislation. The new bill focuses not only on the environmental and community impacts of data centers, but on AI safety as a whole. Since his announcement in December, Sanders has been outspoken about the potential dangers AI poses to society, particularly to workers.

“It makes sense to me that his bill is going to focus primarily on that aspect,” says Mitch Jones, the policy and litigation director at Food and Water Watch, an environmental watchdog group which has advised Sanders’s office on the moratorium. Food and Water Watch also convened the December letter from progressive groups.

Pew’s polling found that Democrats are more likely to view data centers negatively—but it’s not just national progressives raising concerns. Before Sanders voiced his opposition to data centers, some prominent Republican and MAGA politicians, including representative Thomas Massie, senator Josh Hawley, and then-representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, were already vocally questioning the data center buildout. Last month, Hawley and Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal introduced a bill to insulate customers from electricity rate hikes due to data centers. In December, Steve Bannon, one of the most influential anti-AI voices in Washington, hosted a segment on his War Room podcast called “Data Centers Are Devouring Public Land.”

Many of the bills introduced at the state level were sponsored by Democratic politicians. (Food and Water Watch helped craft the New York bill.) Bills in some states, including Oklahoma, were introduced by Republicans; Georgia’s bill had both Democratic and Republican cosponsors.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been especially outspoken on the potential harms from both data centers and artificial intelligence. “I don’t think there’s very many people who want to have higher energy bills just so some chatbot can corrupt some 13-year-old kid online,” DeSantis said at an AI roundtable in February. In December, DeSantis endorsed legislation that would have established a bill of rights to protect consumers from potential harms from AI, including prohibiting minors from interacting with AI chatbots without parental consent, as well as a data center proposal to strip subsidies from tech companies and prohibit data centers from raising electricity bills. The resulting AI bill of rights legislation passed the state Senate, but died in the House.

Both the White House and Big Tech companies have acknowledged that the push to build out data centers suffers from bad public optics. In March, representatives from top data center developers and AI companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, gathered at the White House to sign a nonbinding agreement intended to make data centers pay “the full cost of their energy and infrastructure” and protect consumers from rate hikes.

“Data centers … they need some PR help,” president Donald Trump said at the event. Experts told WIRED that the agreement signed at the White House was largely symbolic, and that some of the key aims of the agreement—including having data centers absorb any additional costs to customers’ bills—are largely out of both the White House and tech companies’ hands.

“A moratorium would limit internet capacity, slow critical services, eliminate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, drain billions in local tax revenue, and raise costs for American families and small businesses,” Cy McNeill, the senior director of federal affairs at the Data Center Coalition, an industry group, told WIRED in an email. The industry, McNeill says, “remains committed to working with communities, local officials, state and federal policymakers, and the Administration to ensure the continued responsible development of this industry while protecting families and businesses.”