Stop AI Data Centers
Bernie Sanders: For being here, the congresswoman and I are gonna be chatting about an enormously important issue. Let me start off by saying that in my view, and in the view of people who know a lot more about this issue than I do, we are at the beginning of the most profound technological revolution in world history, period.
The most profound technological revolution in world history, a revolution that will bring unimaginable changes to our society in a relatively short period of time. Artificial intelligence and robotics will impact our economy, our democracy, our privacy rights, our emotional well-being, our environment, and even our very survival as human beings on this planet. The scale, scope, and speed of this transformation will be unprecedented.
According to Demis, Hassabis, who is the head of Google DeepMind, the AI revolution will be ten times bigger than the Industrial Revolution and ten times faster. In other words, AI and robotics will have a hundred times impact in terms of what the Industrial Revolution did. And it's not just what AI companies are saying, it's what they are doing.
This year alone, four major AI companies are expected to spend roughly six hundred and seventy billion dollars building data centers, and tens of billions more on research and development. Despite the extraordinary importance of this issue and its impact on every man, woman, and child in this country, AI has received far too little serious discussion here in our nation's capital.
I fear that Congress is totally unprepared for the magnitude of the changes that are already taking place. While Congress has not paid attention or enough attention to this issue, the American people have. According to a recent poll, seventy-nine percent of voters are concerned that the government does not have a plan to protect workers from AI job losses.
That same poll also found that fifty-six percent of voters, majority of voters, are concerned about losing their job or having someone in their family lose their jobs in the next year. Not in the next ten years, in the next year. Why are the American people so concerned?
And the answer is they have a lot of reasons to be concerned. They understand that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the billionaire class has never, ever had it so good, some sixty percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck.
And the American people understand that the AI revolution, these massive investments, are being driven by some of the wealthiest people in our country and the world, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison. They understand that these billionaires are investing huge amounts of money into AI and robotics, not to improve life for working families, but to dramatically increase their own wealth and power.
Do you think the average American is sitting around trusting that the multi-billionaires are gonna transform society for the good of ordinary people? I don't think so. In terms of the impact that AI and robotics will have on working people, let us listen to what the tech oligarchs themselves are saying, not the congresswoman, not me.
Let's hear what the tech oligarchs are themselves saying. Elon Musk, who has made massive investments in AI and robotics, has stated, and I quote, "AI and robots will replace all jobs." That's about it. Replace all jobs.
Bill Gates, another massive who's also made massive investments, has said humans, quote, "Won't be needed for most things," end quote. And Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft AI predicts that most white-collar work could be automated within the next decade. What we are talking about, therefore, is the possibility that AI and automation could displace tens of millions of workers in the United States from their current employment.
We're already seeing early signs of this transformation, with declining employment in AI, exposed occupations, and growing difficulty for young people entering the workforce. If machines can perform most economically valuable work better than humans, and that is the goal, that machines will be able to do the job you are doing better than you are doing, if that happens, pretty simple question. What happens to the workers?
How do people earn a living? How do they support their families? And how do programs like Social Security and Medicare survive without a stable tax base? People are not working, they're not paying taxes.
And let me ask a very simple question that is on the minds of millions of Americans. How will workers who lose their jobs find new employment if there are no jobs available? What happens to the over six million truck drivers, cab drivers, rideshare drivers, and bus drivers of virtually if virtually all transportation is conducted through driverless vehicles, which under President Trump seems likely to happen?
What happens to the young college graduates who today going out looking for an entry-level job, but that job is not there? And let me say this, maybe from personal experience, I have seen this before, and the American working class has seen this process play out before. In the nineteen nineties, the working class of this country was told by the corporate world, by the elites, by the corporate media, "Don't worry about unfettered free trade.
My God, NAFTA, PNTR with China, it is gonna create millions and millions of good-paying jobs." Man, Democrats, Republicans, corporate executives, everybody came together, free trade gonna be the best thing that ever happened to American workers. Well, not quite. What happened, in fact, is that thousands and thousands of factories in this country were shut down, and what happened is that millions of workers lost their jobs.
So we have been We have seen this play out in the past. But when we talk about AI and robotics, we're not just talking about the economy. AI is already reshaping how we as human beings relate to each other.
According to a recent poll by Common Sense Media, seventy-two percent of American teenagers say they have used AI for companionship, and more than half do so regularly. What does it mean for young people to form friendships with AI and become more and more lonely and isolated from other human beings? Everybody understands we have a major mental health crisis for our young people right now.
I fear that AI could make it even worse. And then when we talk about what's going on, we also have to talk about privacy. Larry Ellison, second richest person on Earth who's gobbling up a lot of the media in this country, who is a major investor in AI predicts an AI-powered surveillance state is coming where.
This is Larry Ellison, major investor. This is what he says, "Where citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on." End quote. That's your phone calls, your texts, your emails, the websites that you visit.
It will be recorded if we continue the current trends. Further, AI is undermining American democracy. The rise of deep fakes, where you have very convincing fake images.
It happened to me. I don't know if it happened to you. All right. Where they had me selling some rebates or something like that.
Looked very good. Almost convinced me, but it wasn't me. We're seeing fake videos, fake audios. What happens when a day before the election, somebody who looks like the candidate gets up and says something outrageous, and people believe it?
If people cannot trust what they see and hear, informed decision-making becomes nearly impossible. It will become harder and harder to distinguish between truth and untruth. There's also, in what we're seeing now, a significant environmental cost.
AI requires enormous computing power, driving the expansion of energy and water-intensive data centers, increasing electricity demand, and potentially deepening reliance on fossil fuels in the midst of a climate crisis. Finally, now let me say this, and I know some people out there may still think this is science fiction, but it ain't.
I have talked to some of the leading scientists and most knowledgeable people in the world about the potential existential threats that AI brings to the human race, including Geoffrey Hinton. Some of you may know that Dr. Hinton, who is a Nobel Prize winner in physics, he's considered to be the godfather of AI. He's worked on this thing for decades.
They have cautioned us that AI could soon surpass human intelligence and operate independently beyond our control. And if that happens, what they acknowledge is it poses a profound threat to the very survival of the human race. So what is happening in Washington right now in response to all of these enormous concerns?
Well, we learned just today that Donald Trump, has appointed a commission which is made up of the very people who are going to financially benefit from AI and robotics, including some of the wealthiest people in the world, like Mr. Ellison, Mr. Zuckerberg. And the video, the video CEO, Dennis Wong, Jensen Wong. And needless to say, there is no reputation on that commission of workers or environmentalists or consumers.
And that is why, in my view, we need a very different approach. Across the country, communities are already pushing back against the unchecked expansion of data centers. More than a hundred localities have enacted moratoriums or restrictions, and states are beginning to take action as well.
Importantly, and this is a very important point, leaders within the AI industry have called for a pause. The guys who know the most about the threats of the development of AI and robotics, they robotics, they have called for a pause. In twenty twenty-three, just about three years ago, over one thousand experts, including Elon Musk, called for AI labs to, quote, immediately pause for at least six months, end quote.
And if such pause were not enacted, and clearly a pause was not enacted, they called on governments, quote, to step in and institute a moratorium. They understood what is at stake. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I understand what is at stake.
That is why today we are announcing legislation to impose a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place to ensure that AI is safe and effective. That means the government reviews and approves AI products before they are released. Further, that the economic gains of AI and robotics will benefit ordinary Americans and not just the billionaire owners of the industry.
Further, that AI data centers do not increase electricity or utility prices, harm communities, or destroy the environment. Importantly, this legislation would also impose a ban on the export of AI chips to any country without such protections, including China. A moratorium will give us time.
Time to understand the risks, time to protect working families, time to defend our democracy, and time to ensure that this technology works for all of us, not just the few. So with that, let me now introduce the congresswoman from New York, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Thank you. Thank you, Senator.
First and foremost, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to Senator Sanders for bringing us together today to introduce this critical legislation. Within just a matter of short years, AI has become often forcibly integrated into many aspects of American existence, into our doctor's offices, our government, and oftentimes to the detriment of working people. Last year alone, AI was responsible for over fifty-four thousand layoffs nationwide.
And when we talk about those jobs, it's not just a number. These are industries, these are communities, these are families. You know, just a four a few short years ago, Sam Altman came before Congress, and in a direct plea, he begged us to regulate this industry.
He said that these tools were under no circumstances ready, nor should they be integrated into weapons of war. They That we must, impose severe regulations immediately to prevent mass layoffs and to ensure that any productivity that comes of this industry can benefit working people. Three short years later, none of that has happened, and in fact, in many cases, the opposite has happened.
I'll start with another quote from Sam Altman, who said ten years ago, "AI will probably lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning."
While I'm happy that Mr. Altman is responsible, on his end of the deal, you know, he has his responsibilities on the company side, our responsibility is to take care of people, and that is what we're here to do today.
Unfortunately, the leaders of this industry have repeated time and time again that they view working people as an unli as an endless untapped market to be manipulated and exploited, that they would sell our country out if it meant that they could turn a profit. And it is no surprise that in the four years since ChatGPT was released, we have seen AI deployed at a massive scale to create Big Brother-like surveillance.
Every day, Americans are seeing videos of ICE agents waving phones into crowds, threatening that if they use their First Amendment rights, US citizens using their First Amendment rights, that they will be added to some vague database that the American people have not consented to nor are knowledgeable about.
Companies like Palantir are mining endlessly the data and privacy of the American people, keeping track of everything that they say and do, and sending it all to a militarized and centralized government.
When you take the subway, when you share a TikTok, when you talk to your Alexa at home, they are collecting your data and figuring out new ways to weaponize it. And now they are using AI tools to automate this so that it is not only pervasive, but that it is effortless. We must sound the alarm now, and because of this surveillance of the American people is not going to stop, we must stop it.
All of this harm has occurred not in spite of, but because of the absence of federal legislation to regulate AI.
This is not my first bill around AI, and I can tell you that it is extremely discouraging to see how even the most minute efforts to protect people at some of the smallest and most basic level, like trying to prevent AI-generated child pornography, is still combated oftentimes by many people here on the Hill and throughout industry. In this story, currently, the story of AI is a story of corruption.
It is fueled and funded by the same multi-billion dollar corporations lobbying politicians to sit back and do nothing while they harm our communities. In fact, one of the largest explosions of super PAC and outside funding is by the AI industry. And for years, Congress has enabled this permission structure, a permission structure that allows billionaires like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel to be trusted to regulate themselves under the guise of, quote, "American innovation."
And what are they asking for now? Endless energy. These companies are now so desperate to profit off of the AI boom that they are racing to construct thousands of giant AI data centers and jacking up the utility costs of everyday Americans to pay for it. These data centers power thousands of high-intensity computer chips that are processing at all times and require massive amounts of energy to operate.
Just one hyperscale data center consumes the same amount of energy in one second as one hundred thousand households. Because of the massive amounts of energy they use, power and water utility companies must build multi-billion dollar infrastructure to keep up with the demand, and these companies are not paying for their own energy infrastructure. People's energy bills around the country are skyrocketing in order to pay for these AI data centers for them.
In the last five years, Americans who live near data centers saw their electric bills increase over two hundred and sixty-seven percent each month. We are talking about an eighty dollar an, a monthly increase from eighty dollars a month to two hundred and ninety-four dollars a month.
Working people are already living paycheck to paycheck in some states off of wages as low as seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, another federal minimum wage that Congress also refuses to raise. They simply cannot afford another increase to their monthly bills, and this results in people cutting corners whenever they can to keep the lights on, whether it's skipping meals or rationing their insulin.
And while the American people are suffering, Big Tech continues to demand more. More data centers, more energy, more data collection, more American jobs replaced by AI, all on the feet of the American people to pay. And across the country, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are standing up.
People are standing up to Big Tech and saying no to these data centers being built in their own communities. More than one hundred local communities across twelve states have already enacted local moratoriums on data centers, and Congress itself has a moral obligation to stand with them and stop Big Tech from ruining their communities.
Our legislation in the House and the Senate would hit the brakes on construction of new data centers until we address several of the key areas of harm AI poses.
Our bills learn from our lack of regulation following the similar rise, regarding the Internet, and demands a new approach to AI, one that protects the American people from Big Tech's egregious overreach, one bound by our shared commitment over those who wish to patent it, one that centers prosperity for the many over exorbitant profits for the very few. Thank you.
