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 industry’s data center boom.

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

Sanders, I-VT, has called for a national moratorium on data center construction.

“Frankly, I think you’ve got to slow this process down,” Sanders told CNN in a Dec. 28 interview. “It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us it’s coming — you adapt. What are they talking about? They’re going to guarantee healthcare to all people? What are they going to do when people have no jobs?”

Florida Gov. DeSantis unveiled an AI bill of rights on Dec. 4 that would protect local communities’ right to block data center construction among other provisions. The staunch Republican’s proposal could run afoul of the White House, which is pushing to scale up AI as quickly as possible. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Dec. 11 to prevent “excessive state regulation” of AI.

“We have a limited grid. You do not have enough grid capacity in the United States 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 has gotten out, do you want a hyperscale data center in The Villages? Yes or no,” the governor asked. “I think most people would say they don’t want it.”

DeSantis is finishing out his second term as Florida’s governor and his future political ambitions are unclear. Sanders has said his fourth term as Vermont’s senator will likely be his last.

Florida and Vermont are not major data center states. But rising utility bills played a key role in the landslide victory of Democrat Abigail Spanberger in the governor’s race this year in Virginia, the world’s largest data center market.

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

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

“We have gone from a period where data centers were sort of seen as an unmitigated good and as an engine of growth by a lot of elected officials and policymakers to people now recognizing that we’re short,” said Abe Silverman, who served as general counsel for the public utility board in New Jersey from 2019 until 2023 under Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy.

“We do not have enough generation to reliably serve existing customers and data centers,” Silverman said.

The shortage is most acute on the nation’s largest grid, PJM Interconnection, where data center demand is pushing the system to a tipping point. The grid will be six gigawatts short of its reliability requirement by 2027, according to PJM.

The power shortage is nearly equivalent to the electricity demand of Philadelphia, Silverman said. This makes blackouts more likely, he said. “Instead of a blackout happening every one in 10 years, we’re looking at something more often,” the analyst said.

“It’s at a crisis stage right now. PJM has never been this short,” said Joe Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, which serves as the independent market monitor for PJM.

PJM Interconnection serves more than 65 million people across 13 states in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. It includes pivotal swing states for the mid-term elections like Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The price to secure power capacity in PJM has exploded in recent years with $23 billion attributable to data centers, according to watchdog Monitoring Analytics. Those costs are ultimately passed on to consumers. This amounts to a “massive wealth transfer,” the watchdog told PJM in a November letter.

“I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the political repercussions,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm.

“And with a lot more elections in 2026 than 2025, we’ll see a lot of implications,” Gramlich said. “Every politician is going to be saying that they have the answer to affordability and their opponents’ policies would raise rates.”

The shortage will be exacerbated by Trump’s recent decision to pause 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 the huge data center market in northern Virginia.

“By stopping a project that had line of sight to coming online in the very near future, you are directly increasing the prices that we all pay for electricity and not by a little bit,” Silverman said. “That’s a huge, huge additional hole that we now have to dig out of.”

Data centers are facing pushback on multiple fronts now. The PJM watchdog has called for the grid to reject data centers that it does not have the power to serve or require them to bring their own generation. Virginia’s utility regulator is now requiring data centers to pay a majority of the cost of new transmission and generation that serves them beginning in 2027.

Data center developers next year will likely start moving to build more power plants onsite, called co-location, as they struggle to secure supply on the grid quickly, said Brian Fitzsimons, CEO of GridUnity, a company that uses software to help utilities navigate connection requests.

But Silverman said “co-location” has problems that will also face political scrutiny.

“Co-location is effectively taking a generator off the market,” he said. “It would be unethical to end up with a situation where data centers are able to buy private power plants that expose the rest of us to a greater chance of blackouts.”