New Bernie Sanders AI Safety Bill Would Halt Data Center Construction

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.”