As the AI industry heats up globally, several U.S. state legislatures and Sen. Bernie Sanders are calling for a pause on all AI data center development, citing risks of job loss, superintelligence concerns and risks to working people.

Their concerns aren’t baseless, but a data center moratorium is not a solution. Although Sanders hopes it would slow AI development, such a proposal would fail to do so while simultaneously putting the United States at a disadvantage to China.

If the U.S. is to win the AI race, global adoption is critical. While hardware and model innovation for top performance is significant, it is arguably more important that the development ecosystem is accessible and widespread enough to encourage AI developers to choose U.S.-based platforms. In the same way Microsoft’s Windows Phone arrived to the smartphone market too late, excellent hardware and competitive price points mean little when developers have other platforms with 100 million users already.

While much popular discourse of AI is centered on chatbot applications and Large Language Models, in reality, AI is the marriage of many components. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dubs it a “Five-Layer Cake,” with applications, models, chipsets, internal infrastructure (such as casing, networking cables and cooling systems), and external infrastructure. Together, these elements create what we know as AI.

As it stands, these components develop and grow in a symbiotic relationship. With better chipsets, models and applications can be fine-tuned and work faster. Faster applications drive demand for infrastructure investment, which in turn funds research into more powerful housing, cooling and networking mechanisms that, in turn, make chipsets more efficient. When this cycle continues, it attracts the best developers to train models and applications to use U.S.-developed platforms, whether through Nvidia, AMD, Google or others.

What Sanders and others are taking aim at, then, is only one limited component of AI. Even with a moratorium on data centers, the continued build-out of AI would occur globally and domestically, albeit at a slower, more expensive rate in the U.S. Such a self-inflicted wound would give China a further advantage in the already competitive race. We would fail to expand our own capacity to invest in AI and sabotage one of the steps in the self-growth cycle.

Even if we stopped all data center growth, it wouldn’t stop hardware development for AI. Winning the AI race requires more than data centers alone. Right now, the U.S. uses data centers as one large infrastructure piece to power AI, but eventually, we will need to adapt to a model closer to China’s rollout, with many medium pathways.

This will mean integrating AI to be deployed from other infrastructure, such as broadband and cellular towers. The generational jump from 5G to 6G will not be primarily through different signal bands, as prior transitions were, but rather by deploying AI to the infrastructure of cell towers for smart management. This will make signal communication more efficient and enable AI capabilities to reach new heights in areas like self-driving cars and automated manufacturing.

If the U.S. is to beat China in an AI race, it will require a new approach that moves beyond data centers alone. While developing data centers is important for the U.S. now, this deployment is critical for tomorrow. A moratorium on data centers wouldn’t stop AI growth, as it would merely shift to these new pathways, but it would make our offerings much less competitive globally.

By ceding our data center growth, we hamper our ability to expand into this deployment, allowing China to keep its stranglehold on the cellular infrastructure. China’s 5G tower expansion globally has left the U.S. behind, with even large parts of Europe using Huawei technology. This is partly due to the slow pace of FCC band approvals and government hesitation to accommodate demand from the commercial industries.

In contrast, the Chinese government allowed its commercial industries to set the course and made it a priority for the state government. This has led to Huawei’s lead in the 5G market and allowed China to extract concessions globally from countries eager to gain the growth enabled by access to wireless internet infrastructure. It is clearly in the U.S.’s interests to prevent a repeat of this.

AI growth gives the U.S. the chance to reclaim that, but only if we keep up with commercial AI development. If we can demonstrate superiority on AI hardware domestically, it will be easier to export this technology to Europe, Africa and other countries. A data center moratorium strikes at the heart of development necessary for the U.S. to keep up.

For every concern about job loss and superintelligence, there are miracles of healthcare development and newfound entrepreneurship. By handicapping our domestic capabilities, we forfeit the gains of AI and fail to avoid potential pitfalls, handing China a free win without even competing.

_____

ABOUT THE WRITER

Donald Kimball is the communications manager and Tech Exchange editor for Washington Policy Center. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

_____

©2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC