Sanders and DeSantis’ opposition to data centers is a bad sign for AI

Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and right-wing Gov. Ron DeSantis agree on virtually nothing. But they found common ground this year as leading skeptics of the artificial intelligence sector’s data center boom.

The alignment of two national figures left and right indicates that a political awakening is brewing about the impact of the AI ​​industry on electricity prices, grid stability and the labor market. The opposition could slow the industry’s development plans if it achieves broad bipartisan consensus.

SandersI-VT, called for a national moratorium on data center construction.

“Frankly, I think we need to slow this process down,” Sanders said. told CNN in an interview on December 28. “It’s not enough for the oligarchs to tell us that this is happening: we have to adapt. What are they talking about? Are they going to guarantee health care for everyone? What are they going to do when people don’t have work?”

Florida Governor DeSantis unveiled a AI Bill of Rights on December 4, it would protect the right of local communities to block the construction of data centers, among other provisions. The staunch Republican’s proposal could run counter to the White House, which is pushing to develop AI as quickly as possible. President Donald Trump issued a decree on December 11 to prevent “excessive state regulation” of AI.

“We have limited network. In the United States, you don’t have enough network capacity to do what they’re trying to do,” DeSantis said of the AI ​​industry’s data center plans at an event in The Villages, Florida.

“As more and more information comes out, do you want a hyperscale data center in The Villages? Yes or no,” said the the governor asked. “I think most people would say they don’t want it.”

DeSantis is finishing his second term as governor of Florida and his future political ambitions are unclear. Sanders announced his fourth term as senator from Vermont will probably be his last.

Florida and Vermont are not Major Data Center States. But rising utility bills played a key role in Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s landslide victory in this year’s gubernatorial race in Virginia, the world’s largest data center market.

Residential electricity prices are expected to rise another 4% on average nationwide in 2026, after rising about 5% in 2025, according to the Federal Energy Information Administration.

With the cost of living at the center of American politics, the impact of data centers on local communities will likely play a role in next November’s midterm elections.

“We’ve gone from a period where data centers were sort of seen as an absolute commodity and an engine of growth by a lot of elected officials and policymakers to people now recognizing that we’re running out,” said Abe Silverman, who served as general counsel for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities from 2019 to 2023 under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

“We don’t have enough production to reliably serve existing customers and data centers,” Silverman said.

The shortage is most acute on the nation’s largest network, PJM Interconnection, where demand for data centers is pushing the system toward a tipping point. The grid will fall six gigawatts short of its reliability needs by 2027, according to PJM.

The electricity shortage is almost equivalent to Philadelphia’s electricity demand, Silverman said. That makes outages more likely, he said. “Instead of a power outage every 10 years, we are facing something more frequent,” the analyst said.

“We’re in a crisis phase right now. PJM has never been so short,” said Joe Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, which serves as an independent market monitor for PJM.

PJM Interconnection serves more than 65 million people in 13 states in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. It includes swing states for the midterm elections, such as Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The price to secure PJM’s electrical capacity has skyrocketed in recent years to $23 billion attributable to data centers, according to watchdog Monitoring Analytics. These costs are ultimately passed on to consumers. This amounts to a “massive transfer of wealth,” the watchdog told PJM in a statement. November letter.

“I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the political fallout,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, an energy industry consulting firm.

“And with a lot more elections in 2026 than in 2025, we’ll see a lot of implications,” Gramlich said. “All politicians will say they have the solution when it comes to affordability and that their opponents’ policies would raise rates.”

The shortage will be exacerbated by Trump’s recent decision to suspend all offshore wind farms under construction off the East Coast, Silverman said. This includes Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, a massive 2.6 gigawatt project that would help supply Northern Virginia’s massive data center market.

“By stopping a project that was likely to come online in the very near future, you are directly increasing the prices we all pay for electricity, and not just a little bit,” Silverman said. “It’s a huge additional hole that we now have to dig.”

Data centers are now facing resistance on multiple fronts. Watchdog PJM has called on the network to reject data centers it doesn’t have the authority to serve or ask them to bring in their own generation. Virginia’s utility regulator now requires data centers to pay the majority of the cost of new transmission and generation that serves them starting in 2027.

Next year, data center developers will likely begin building more on-site power plants, called colocation, as they struggle to quickly secure supply on the grid, said Brian Fitzsimons, CEO of GridUnity, a company that uses software to help utilities manage connection demands.

But Silverman said “co-housing” poses problems that will also be subject to political scrutiny.

“Co-location effectively takes a generator out of the market,” he said. “It would be unethical to find ourselves in a situation where data centers can purchase private power plants, putting the rest of us at greater risk of power outages.”