By Rich Lowry
Friday, December 19, 2025
Most people welcome economic growth, but Bernie Sanders
hates it. As they say, there’s no accounting for taste.
The Vermont socialist has come out against data centers,
the mass computing facilities essential to the development of artificial
intelligence.
There are all sorts of NIMBY-type reasons for local
residents to oppose data centers — they use a lot of energy and water, they are
noisy and unsightly — but Sanders is against them on principle.
If he can stop the creation of new data centers, he can
squeeze AI research to a standstill and supposedly save American jobs and give
Congress more time to regulate the new industry.
When Donald Trump floated the idea of a Muslim ban during
his 2016 presidential campaign, he said we needed a moratorium “until our
country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
In a nutshell, that’s the Sanders position on AI.
This might be the most poisonously stupid idea of the
year.
The sheer destructiveness of it is on par, say, with
blocking the creation of new generators after Thomas Edison set up the Pearl
Street Station in 1882 on grounds that we didn’t fully understand how
electrification would affect cities. Or prohibiting the mining of coal in
Britain at the outset of the Industrial Revolution because the coming changes
were too hard to fathom.
The comparison with the Industrial Revolution is apt. The
benefits to Britain of leading the way were vast, in terms of economic growth,
trade, the welfare of its people, and national power.
There is a winner-take-all aspect to these sorts of tech
races. The company that takes the lead and gets people acclimated to its
product earns the revenue that it can plow back into further research and
development. In so doing, it maintains its lead in the market.
Why wouldn’t we want this company to be American rather
than Chinese?
There will also be crucial military applications of AI.
History says that a leg up in technical acumen can make the difference between
victory and defeat. The Blitzkrieg swept all before it because the Nazis had
figured out how to wed innovations in mobility to advances in radio
communications. The British, in turn, fended off the Nazi air assault in the
Battle of Britain because they made maximum use of radar without the Germans
realizing it.
Sanders wants us to take our chances ceding a
technological advantage to China and hoping everything turns out okay. The
Chinese may be communists — whereas Sanders is just a socialist — but even they
aren’t this foolish.
We are in the equivalent of a space race, and Sanders is
talking about cutting off our supply of rocket fuel.
There may be cause eventually to regulate AI, but we
don’t even know how it’s going to develop at the moment; we had to have the
widespread adoption of cars before we had the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration.
Even if Sanders were to get his way, there’s no stopping
AI. China and other foreign countries will continue to sprint ahead, and U.S.
companies denied data centers here at home will go find them overseas.
McKinsey & Company estimates that $7 trillion will be
invested in data centers globally by 2030, with 40 percent of that coming in
the United States. This investment has already been a boon to the U.S. economy,
making up for any weakness due to other factors. It’d be perverse to
affirmatively seek to cut off a capital investment spigot that every other
country in the world should envy.
The practical issues with data centers, primarily energy
usage, are solvable by rationalizing our energy policies. It will be shame on
us — an energy behemoth — if we can’t figure out how to power the research that
might create the defining innovations of our age.
As for Bernie Sanders, he calls himself a progressive.
Yet, his troglodyte opposition to a potential productivity revolution shows
that he’s really the nation’s foremost reactionary socialist.
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