Bernie Sanders and AOC Want to Sink the AI Economy

https://www.city-journal.org/article/aoc-bernie-sanders-ai-chips-data-centers

Publish Date: 2026-03-27 18:20:00

Artificial intelligence is currently the white-hot center of America’s economy. Big Tech is investing more than $750 billion in data centers this year, mostly domestically. Unsurprisingly, wages for construction workers and the skilled trades are skyrocketing. Communities like Virginia’s Loudoun County are almost covering their entire operating budgets through data-center taxes.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders want to put a stop to all of that. On Wednesday, the pair jointly proposed a universal halt to America’s AI economy. Their bill would enact a moratorium on new and existing data-center growth as well as a ban on exporting AI chips. The pause would last until Congress passes a “framework” to regulate the industry.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

In other words, the degrowth duo want to tie up America’s most innovative and globally competitive industry using the same bureaucratic process that has recently resulted in TSA airport security lines snaking through terminals and parking garages. And they want to take advantage of Americans’ understandable fears about new technology to impose their radical beliefs on the nation’s economy.

It’s a far cry from how we used to think about growth. Back in 1996, as the World Wide Web was spreading but before the dot-com boom took off, a bipartisan group of legislators passed the Telecommunications Act, which opened up the nascent internet economy to bountiful innovation with a carefully crafted regulatory framework. That bill passed 414–16 in the House and 91–5 in the Senate. It’s unimaginable that a law with such a singular focus on openness and American growth could win such broad support today.

What Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders imagine goes hard in the opposite direction. They want to take Ezra Klein’s “everything-bagel liberalism” and add in even more…

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