Lacalle: Data Center Moratorium Madness Is Beijing's Biggest Gift

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Lacalle: Data Center Moratorium Madness Is Beijing's Biggest Gift Authored by Daniel Lacalle,Barely 48 hours after the midterms, Bernie Sanders posted five words that should alarm…

Barely 48 hours after the midterms, Bernie Sanders posted five 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.

The energy behind that…

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