The fight over AI is not just about technology. It’s about whether America builds fast enough to stay ahead of China—or whether we slow ourselves down while Beijing leans on the gas.
In the past, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has made waves by standing up for the Communist dictatorship in Cuba. But the Senator outdid himself when he recently hosted a Capitol Hill panel with two top Chinese AI officials tied to Beijing’s Ministry of Science and Technology. The platforming of representatives from our greatest adversary was quite enough. But coupled with Sanders’ push to slam the brakes on the data center boom America needs to lead in artificial intelligence, one might wonder whose side he’s really on.
Xue Lan, chairman of China’s New Generation Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional Committee and a professor at Tsinghua University, joined Zeng Yi, dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, at the Sanders event. Many were quick to point out that their presence served to legitimize China’s AI playbook and undercut the Trump administration’s effort to ensure American AI dominates the future.
Sanders adopted the doomerist arguments about AI’s impact on jobs and the environment that inform his Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act. If adopted, the bill would freeze the expansion of AI infrastructure across the United States. But both the bill and his remarks fail to acknowledge how they would weaken the country’s ability to compete with a regime that treats AI as a weapon of global influence.
Critics from the White House, national security circles, and the data center industry have warned that this kind of move would hand China a strategic advantage. If we slow‑roll the backbone of modern computing while China is building like crazy, we’re not being “responsible” as Sanders argues. We’re ceding dominance to a foreign competitor.
Sanders’ coziness with China is especially concerning amid reported foreign-funded efforts to slow America’s AI progress. The American Energy Institute revealed that 12 organizations opposing U.S. data center development have collectively received more than $39 million from foreign donors. Washington should be building faster, not listening to paid activists who want to hobble us.
The AI revolution is a matter of vital national security. The data centers behind AI don’t just run chatbots—they power military planning, intelligence analysis, cyber operations, and autonomous systems already reshaping the battlefield, as well as the cloud services, advanced models, and next-generation industrial tools that underpin American economic strength. The Pentagon isn’t investing in AI because it’s trendy. It’s doing it because military advantage now depends on computing power, speed, and scale. Slow the infrastructure, and you don’t just slow innovation—you compromise America’s strategic position.
AI is already transforming warfare, intelligence, logistics, and high-level decision-making. The Pentagon has launched an AI Acceleration Strategy because military advantage depends on who can move faster technologically. In Ukraine, AI-enabled systems are already changing how wars are fought. The country that builds faster, learns faster, and deploys faster will have the decisive edge.
China gets that. Beijing is building aggressively, expanding its data center capacity and treating AI infrastructure as a national priority. It’s also moving fast to lock down talent, control capital, and shape the global standards that will govern AI systems for years to come.
Building data centers is not just about checking economic boxes. If America slows down, China doesn’t just catch up—it starts setting the terms. It starts shaping the rules, the standards, and the future of this technology.
Blanket opposition to data center growth is not prudent. It’s surrender.
Data centers create jobs, attract investment, and support innovation across sectors—from healthcare to manufacturing to autonomous systems. They’re part of the ecosystem that lets U.S. companies develop better chips, better models, and better applications. If we choke off the infrastructure layer, we choke off the rest of the stack.
Today, our free market-driven system still outcompetes China’s, but it will remain that way only if we continue to build. That means powering ahead on data centers, chips, energy, and the infrastructure that makes AI leadership possible.
Sanders' event is only one part of a much larger effort at the national and local level to pump the brakes on the AI infrastructure that underpins our tech leadership. We shouldn’t just be calling out the Senator’s performative outrage but rooting out the other drivers of the anti-AI voices declaring the sky is falling. Because if we heed those voices and fail to build now, we’ll find ourselves in a truly dystopian future dominated by AI controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Joe Grogan served as a domestic policy adviser to President Trump from 2019 to 2020 and is the President and co-founder of Public Policy Solutions.
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