Barely 48 hours after the midterms, Bernie Sanders posted four words that should alarm anyone who cares about American prosperity and security. “National data center moratorium now.” Representative Yassamin Ansari went further and said that pausing AI development should be a Day One priority for the new Democratic majority in the House. The vehicle is ready. The Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, introduced by Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would impose an immediate federal freeze on the construction of new data centers and the expansion of existing ones until Congress passes comprehensive legislation. In practice that means an open-ended ban, conditional on Washington agreeing on everything from labor policy to civil rights to the meaning of “safe AI”. Anyone who has watched Congress try to pass a budget knows how long that would take.
This is the most self-destructive industrial policy proposal in the developed world since Germany decided to shut down its nuclear plants while importing Russian gas. And Beijing could not have designed it better.
The problem did not start with the midterms, and it is not limited to one party. In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott paused grid approvals for data centers of 75 MW or more in August and then halted environmental permits in September. The Texas pause alone put almost 20% of the entire US data center pipeline at risk of delay. Now Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has promised to turn that pause into a formal moratorium.. Local opposition blocked or delayed around $198 billion of US data center projects in the first half of 2026 alone, against total AI capital expenditure of $690 to $725 billion this year.
While American towns vote to ban the infrastructure of the future, China treats compute as a strategic priority on the same level as energy and defense. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reports that national intelligent computing capacity rose 146% year on year. Beijing’s new five-year plan targets 3.8 trillion yuan of cumulative investment in information infrastructure. China’s data center capacity is expected to grow from 32 GW at the end of 2025 to 40 GW at the end of 2026 and above 60 GW by 2030.
The energy behind that expansion is the part Western activists prefer to ignore. China added a record 430 GW of wind and solar capacity in 2025 and, at the same time, commissioned 78 GW of coal power, the highest annual figure in a decade. Total installed generating capacity rose 16.1% in a single year to 3.89 TW.
Beijing does not ask whether it should build data centers or power plants. It builds both, simultaneously, and plans the grid around the compute. A 100 MW Chinese facility can be completed in less than twelve months, compared to around 24 months in the United States and 42 months in Germany.
But in a technology race, the stock of capacity matters less than the rate of addition. Model scaling, inference at scale and the deployment of applications in industry, healthcare and defense depend on how fast new compute comes online. China’s binding constraint is access to advanced chips, which US export controls deliberately restrict. America’s binding constraint is power and politics. The moratorium movement takes the one bottleneck Beijing cannot fix with money and adds a second one that Washington imposes on itself.
Every year of delay in Ohio, Texas or New York is a year in which Huawei, domestic Chinese chipmakers and state-backed clusters get closer while American capacity stalls.
The usual justification for bans is the electricity bill. The real problem is a lack of supply. The US interconnection queue holds roughly 2,600 GW of generation and storage projects, more than double the existing grid, and the median wait from application to commercial operation is about five years.
When demand rises and supply is blocked, prices rise. The solution is to unblock supply, accelerate permits for gas, nuclear and transmission, and require large users to bring or pay for their own generation. Banning demand is the policy equivalent of fixing a housing shortage by forbidding families from having children. It addresses the symptom by destroying the source of growth.
Artificial intelligence is already improving targeting, logistics, electronic warfare, intelligence analysis and autonomous systems. Compute is to modern defense what steel output was to the twentieth century. A relative slowdown in American capacity narrows the margin of superiority on which deterrence depends, and it does so at the worst possible moment, when Beijing is offering its own models, standards and cheap infrastructure to the Global South. Countries that cannot get American compute on time will get Chinese compute instead, along with Chinese standards, Chinese data governance and Chinese political leverage.
The Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez bill even includes a ban on exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that lack equivalent safety and environmental laws. Put together, the message to allies would be devastating. America would refuse to build at home and refuse to sell abroad. Beijing would be delighted to fill both gaps.
Europe is watching the midterm results with a mix of political satisfaction and strategic blindness. Many European capitals see the Democratic gains as a welcome rebuke to Trump. They should look at the numbers instead. Europe accounts for less than 5% of global AI computing power. Its own public backlash has already delayed or cancelled about $42 billion of European data center investment. With the AI Act, some of the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and no private capital engine comparable to Silicon Valley, Europe depends on American models and American infrastructure. If that infrastructure arrives later and costs more, Europe falls further behind, and if China closes the gap in dual-use AI, European security, which still rests on American technological leadership, erodes with it. Short-term relief over tariffs does not compensate for a long-term loss of the technological edge. As usual in Europe, ideology is trumping strategic economic and defense interests.
The data center backlash is a perfect example of the precautionary principle turned into economic suicide. Every concern raised by opponents, from water use to grid reliability to electricity bills, has a solution that involves building more, not less. More generation, more transmission, faster permits, clear rules on who pays for grid upgrades, and on-site power for the largest loads.
A moratorium solves none of those problems. It simply guarantees that the most important infrastructure of the century gets built somewhere else, under a regime that does not care about American ratepayers, American workers or American values. The United States won the internet, the cloud and the smartphone because it built faster than anyone else. If it now decides to stop building, it should not be surprised when the future is written by China.