Carson Introduces Data Center Moratorium Bill

WASHINGTON, DC — Today, Congressman André Carson (IN-07) joined his colleagues – led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — in introducing the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. This bill would enact a reasonable pause on the development of new data centers until safeguards are put in place to protect Americans. 

“Data centers cannot come at a cost to American families, who are already facing high grocery, gas, and housing costs,” said Congressman Carson. “Data centers have the potential to create good union jobs, but they also have the potential to eliminate jobs. We need to make sure workers, families, and neighborhoods aren’t forced to pay the burden of this rapidly rising technology without guardrails. Our bill would enact a pause until we can guarantee common sense protections.” 

Congressman Carson has also introduced the AI Data Center Site Selection Transparency Act of 2026 to require data centers to be transparent and to make neighborhood input central to any new development.” 

“AI and robotics are creating the most sweeping technological revolution in the history of humanity. The scale, scope and speed of that change is unprecedented. Congress is way behind where it should be in understanding the nature of this revolution and its impacts,” Sanders said. “Bottom line: We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity. We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue. The time for action is now. We need a federal moratorium on AI data centers.”

“We have seen ICE partner with AI companies to surveil Americans, social media users employ AI bots to create sexually explicit deepfakes of women and children, and data center construction inflate electric bills in communities across the country. And all of this harm has occurred because of the absence of federal legislation to regulate AI,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Congress has a moral obligation to stand with the American people and stop the expansion of these data centers until we have a framework to adequately address the existential harm AI poses to our society. We must choose humanity over profit.”

The AI Data Center Moratorium Act of 2026 would institute an immediate federal moratorium on AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place to ensure that:

Additionally, 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 would ban U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place, guaranteeing AI is safe and effective, workers are protected, and AI does not harm the environment.

In 2023, more than 1,000 industry leaders and scientists, including Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, called for AI labs to “immediately pause for at least 6 months” and, if such a pause were not enacted, called on governments to “step in and institute a moratorium.” In December, Elon Musk, who leads xAI, said he had “a lot of AI nightmares” and would “certainly slow down AI and robotics” if he could. In January, Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s Deepmind, said he would support an AI pause if he knew other countries and companies also paused development. In February, Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, said he was “absolutely in favor of trying” to slow down AI development if other countries also slowed down.

Read a section-by-section summary here.