From Smash to Grab

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

I’m old enough to remember when Bernie Sanders proposed a moratorium on the construction of data centers.

 

The Hill, March 25, 2026:

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) plan to introduce legislation that would bar construction of all new data centers until “strong national safeguards are in place.”

 

The pair announced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act on Wednesday, which aims to halt construction of AI infrastructure until lawmakers enact measures requiring government reviews of AI products, preventing mass job displacement and limiting increases in consumer electricity prices.

 

Now, however, there is this. Sanders, writing in the New York Times:

 

I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.

 

Yes, expropriation.

 

At a quick glance, these two proposals seem to contradict each other. The moratorium, self-evidently enough, is designed to slow down the roll-out of hyperscale data centers and, by extension, AI.

 

There may be cases where a data center is inappropriate for a certain site. But that is something to be sorted out on a local basis, not by a blanket, top-down moratorium, especially when that moratorium is “about” far more than ensuring, say, that new data centers place an undue burden on electricity bills or are too noisy or too bright for their planned location or (and this is not generally an issue that stands up to scrutiny) threaten water supplies.

 

Thus, the areas in which Sanders would like to see “guardrails” established before the lifting of his moratorium include measures to ensure “the economic gains of AI and robotics will benefit workers, not just the wealthy owners of Big Tech.” That looks like an invitation to a debate that could last years, which may well be the point.

 

In a press release explaining his proposed moratorium, Sanders also argued:

 

This bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet. It accomplishes this by banning U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place to guarantee AI is safe and effective, workers are protected and AI does not harm the environment.

 

The restrictions on exports are, if imposed intelligently, fine, but Sanders’s moratorium will not stop a “global race” to develop ever more advanced AI. It will merely concede it to China. We don’t know yet what the effects of AI on jobs will be, but, unless we move forward with it, we will not discover what jobs it can create here. But we will find out what how many jobs the U.S. will lose to AI-powered foreign competition.

 

As for ensuring that the U.S. does not develop an AI that “destroys the planet,” let’s just say that unilateral disarmament is highly unlikely to avoid the development (or attempt to develop) such lethal AI elsewhere. Best guess: it will merely ensure that if such AI is ever developed it will be by the Beijing regime, and that the U.S. will have no response.

 

Sanders’s proposed expropriation is not aimed at enriching the taxpayer (an aim somewhat difficult to reconcile with his moratorium), but it does look a lot like an alternative route to gumming up the development of AI in the U.S.

 

He writes:

 

The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.

 

It would take up an immense amount of space to list the ways in which big government could abuse that power. That its involvement would also slow down the development of AI would be inevitable.

 

The mere existence of such a proposal (and indeed the moratorium) is likely to scare off capital and talent from a technology that may hand the U.S. immense technological and geopolitical advantages. Why do that?

 

Moreover, some of that talent and capital could easily end up elsewhere. Doors would open in Beijing.

 

Imagine if Thomas Edison or Henry Ford had been obliged to contend with a Sanders. Or picture the moment when, sensing an approaching storm, Benjamin Franklin makes his big move only to be confronted by a time-traveling Sanders and told to step away from the kite.