Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Introduce Bill to Halt AI Data Center Construction

Bernie Sanders wants to pull the plug on every new AI data center in the country. On Wednesday, the Vermont senator and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled out the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act. If it became law, no facility drawing more than 20 megawatts could break ground or expand until Congress writes regulations on worker protections, environmental damage, privacy, and civil rights, according to WIRED.

Nothing like it has reached Capitol Hill before. Food & Water Watch, the advocacy group that marshaled the coalition behind the bill, called it "first-of-its-kind." Consider the backdrop: electricity rates surged 31% between 2020 and 2025, and one hyperscale data center eats as much power as two million homes. Someone is paying for all of this, and the bill's backers insist it should not be ratepayers.

The bill's four conditions

There is no sunset clause. The freeze stays until Congress acts, and the bar is high, Business Insider reported. Lawmakers would have to create a federal review process for new AI products, write rules to prevent mass job displacement, guarantee that data center operators absorb their own energy costs instead of passing them to households, and require union wages on construction sites. All of that. Before a single permit gets approved.

"If there are no jobs and humans won't be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get health care, or to pay the rent?" Sanders told Rolling Stone. "There's not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality."

Twenty megawatts. That is where Sanders drew the line. Anything above that threshold counts as an AI data center under the bill, which targets hyperscale facilities run by Microsoft, Google, and Meta while leaving smaller operations alone. State-level moratoriums have been spreading this year, with a dozen legislatures filing their own versions, but most of those target energy consumption broadly. Sanders aimed squarely at AI. His bill has no expiration date, and the pair planned to unveil it at a Capitol Hill press conference Wednesday afternoon.

A lonely push finds allies

Back in December 2025, Sanders stood pretty much alone on this. He proposed the moratorium days after more than 230 advocacy groups sent a letter to congressional leaders demanding a construction pause. Food & Water Watch led that push, having called for a total moratorium the previous October. Capitol Hill shrugged.

Dick Blumenthal said he shared the goals but not the method. He wanted data centers to prove they could absorb utility cost increases before plugging into the grid, not a blanket freeze. Robin Kelly, running for Senate in Illinois, said she does "not oppose new data centers" but wanted clean energy strings attached to permits. Polite distance.

Even Ocasio-Cortez hedged. "I think it's something that I'm happy to consider and discuss, but we just haven't yet," she told Business Insider in January. Three months later, her name is on the bill. She plans to introduce a companion version in the House, adding to an AI track record that already includes the DEFIANCE Act, her legislation giving deepfake abuse survivors legal recourse.

What turned the tide? Local politics did. Denver's mayor put his own moratorium in place. Frederick County went a step further. Residents gathered enough signatures, twenty-two thousand of them, to force a referendum on data center zoning. The nonprofit Good Jobs First has been watching all of this unfold and counting. Sixty-three local moratorium actions so far. Fifty-four passed. Twelve state legislatures filed moratorium bills this session, from Georgia to Wyoming. And community opposition had already stalled or killed $98 billion in data center projects during the second quarter of 2025 alone. That's not fringe activism. That's a national pattern.

Progressives in Congress caught on. Pramila Jayapal signed up. Rashida Tlaib endorsed the moratorium outright on X. Ilhan Omar called it "a good idea." Maxwell Frost backed it. Brett Guthrie, the Republican who chairs House Energy and Commerce and has two proposed data centers sitting in his Kentucky district, could not bring himself to dismiss Sanders's push when E&E News asked.

The opposition assembles

The White House responded before the bill text was public. AI Czar David Sacks called the moratorium an exercise in "stopping progress completely so China wins the AI race." Last week, the administration released a national policy framework urging Congress to "streamline federal permitting for AI infrastructure construction and operation" and proposing a blanket prohibition on state-level AI regulation.

John Fetterman went harder. The Pennsylvania senator called the Sanders-AOC bill "China First," two words designed to recast the whole debate. Forget the environment, forget the energy bills. This is about geopolitics now. And the argument has traction in a Congress worried about falling behind Beijing, where data center operators reportedly pay around three cents per kilowatt-hour, less than half what American facilities face.

Cy McNeill, who runs federal affairs for the Data Center Coalition, warned that data centers "power modern life" and that a moratorium risks "rationing access to digital services, impairs our global competitiveness, and will have substantial impacts on Americans' daily lives."

The White House had already tried a gentler approach. Earlier this month, it brokered the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a voluntary deal in which tech companies said they would shield consumers from utility rate spikes tied to data center energy draw. A March poll found most Americans didn't buy it, The Guardian reported. No enforcement mechanism exists. The companies signing the pledge are simultaneously spending tens of billions building the very infrastructure that's driving the rate increases. That's the tension Sanders wants voters to see.

The resource numbers behind the fight

Your electricity bill tells part of the story. That 31% rate increase from 2020 to 2025 didn't happen in a vacuum, and the five years before it saw just a 4% rise, according to figures compiled by Common Dreams. Cooling is another drain. Water is the other cost nobody talks about enough. Projections show AI data centers by 2028 burning through the equivalent of what 18.5 million households consume daily, all of it pumped through cooling systems to keep racks of GPUs from melting down.

Communities figured this out before Congress did. They blocked or delayed sixty-four billion dollars' worth of data center projects between May 2024 and March 2025. In Monterey Park, California, neighbors showed up to fight a StratCap facility proposed right next to their houses. Prince George's County had a task force look at the local grid. The conclusion was blunt: it could not handle more load. Tighter restrictions followed. A Kentucky farm family turned down $26 million for 600 acres from an unnamed AI data center developer. They told Tom's Hardware they wanted to "stay and hold and feed a nation."

The pressure goes deeper than any single town. Coal plants that should be decommissioned stay running to feed data center demand. New natural gas plants get built. E-waste piles up with no federal plan to manage it. And the industry does not wait for regulators to catch up. Crusoe Energy bought multi-day battery systems this week to power new sites. Adani is eyeing partnerships with Meta and Google for facilities in India, Bloomberg reported. Microsoft signed a lease for a Texas data center that Oracle and OpenAI had walked away from. You can see it in northern Virginia's Data Center Alley, the largest cluster of server capacity on Earth, where farms that grew corn a decade ago now grow cooling towers.

Symbolic legislation, real momentum

Nobody should expect this to become law. Not this session. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, said as much back in January: "This Congress isn't going to do that. He's pointing out the right problems." Both chambers are in Republican hands, and leadership sees the tech industry as an ally worth protecting. The White House framework released last week called for faster data center permitting. Not slower. Faster.

Sanders knows. He visited AI executives in California earlier this year. He has been posting videos on social media, building pressure one clip at a time. "A few months ago, when I proposed a moratorium on AI data centers, it was perceived as a radical, fringe and Luddite idea," he said in February, after Denver's mayor announced the city's own pause. "Well, not anymore."

What the bill actually does is put a federal name on something that is already happening at the local level. Towns and counties are blocking data centers through zoning fights, ballot referendums, executive orders. New York's legislature is considering a three-year construction pause with mandatory environmental impact studies from the state's Department of Environmental Conservation. It would be the strongest state moratorium in the country. Sanders wants to take that impulse national, with uniform standards for labor, energy costs, and environmental protection.

"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," Sanders said.

The vote won't come. Not this year. What comes instead is the next wave of permit applications, water requests, and grid connection filings in places where local utilities already struggle to keep the lights on. Towns and counties across the country have been turning those applications down without waiting for Congress to weigh in. Sanders took that grassroots anger and put it in a bill. Whether Washington acts on it is, for now, beside the point.

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Maria Garcia

Los Angeles

Tech culture and generative AI reporter covering the intersection of AI with digital culture, consumer behavior, and content creation platforms. Focusing on technology's beneficiaries and those left behind by AI adoption. Based in California.