Senator Bernie Sanders on Data Centers, AI, and the Fight Ahead

Just a few days ago, Elon Musk became a trillionaire, at the same time as 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 20% of our seniors are trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less, and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth. The income and wealth disparity is extraordinary. The danger is not just that the rich and the billionaires have so much wealth—they now have so much power.

Every single place we go, trying to elect progressives all over this country, we’re finding enormous amounts of money flooding in from AI, from crypto, from AIPAC, from the military-industrial complex. What elections are about right now is billionaires spending all kinds of money on ugly thirty second ads, trying to destroy people who are standing up for justice. It is a corrupt political and campaign finance system that has to be dealt with.

You add all of that together—a war in Iran that is illegal and unconstitutional, with tens of thousands dead, gas prices through the roof, a president who thinks climate change is a hoax and ignores the Constitution and the rule of law—and people understand that status quo politics, old establishment politics tinkering around the edges, is no longer good enough.

We need fundamental changes in the way this country does business. We need a government that starts representing ordinary people, not just the oligarchs. Data centers are an example of exactly that problem.

You know me well enough to know that I am not a tech guy. I don’t stay up nights dealing with technology. Not my thing. But I’m reading the same stuff that you’re reading. I’m reading people say that AI is going to be the most transformative technology in the history of humanity. It’s going to make the Industrial Revolution seem like nickel-and-dime stuff. It’s going to impact every man, woman, and child. It’s going to impact our economy, it’s going to impact our privacy, it’s going to impact the health of our children. It’s going to impact how we relate to each other as human beings. I’ve talked to Nobel Prize winners who tell us there is an existential threat: if AI becomes smarter than human beings, it can become independent of human control with possible cataclysmic results.

So I’m reading all of this, and I’m saying, oh my god, this is a huge issue. Clearly my colleagues on this or that committee that deal with this stuff must be doing something. And the answer is, zilch. Nothing.

The reason for that is this: the AI industry has and will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on campaign ads. You get up and talk about regulating AI in a sensible way, you’re going to have all kinds of ads the next day against you. Somebody had to do it, so it was me. We started off by saying, hey, this stuff is moving just too fast. We’re seeing data centers impacting local communities in terms of electric rates, in terms of impact on water, in terms of noise, in terms of just environmental degradation in the entire area.

So we got involved in a number of ways. First, moratoriums. In just a few months there’s been increased discussion all over this country, people saying, thank you very much, we don’t want that data center in our community. Take Memphis, Tennessee, [where Mr. Musk rammed through the rapid construction of his own massive supercommuting data center with zero public input.] This is a low-income, primarily Black community, where the air is now terrible, there’s noise and everything else. And Musk violated the law in order to rush this thing through. We are seeing people standing up all over this country, saying: before you build data centers, we need a lot of questions answered. That’s why I brought forth the idea of a moratorium on data centers.

Second, there’s the broader issue: the whole AI revolution is being pushed by the wealthiest people on Earth. And what do they want? They want more wealth, they want more power. We’ve got to stop that. So we’ve introduced what is called an AI Sovereign Wealth Fund, which would make certain that 50% of the ownership of every major corporation dealing with AI is controlled by the public. So to the degree that wealth is created, the public will benefit—not just a handful of billionaires.

I want to applaud Third Act for mobilizing seniors all across this country to get involved in the political process and to stand up and fight for climate justice, economic justice, and racial justice. That is exactly the kind of grassroots organizing we need.