ArcaMax

Most people welcome economic growth, but Bernie Sanders hates it. As they say, there's no accounting for taste.

The Vermont socialist has come out against data centers, the mass computing facilities essential to the development of artificial intelligence.

There are all sorts of NIMBY-type reasons for local residents to oppose data centers -- they use a lot of energy and water, they are noisy and unsightly -- but Sanders is against them on principle.

If he can stop the creation of new data centers, he can squeeze AI research to a standstill and supposedly save American jobs and give Congress more time to regulate the new industry.

When Donald Trump floated the idea of a Muslim ban during his 2016 presidential campaign, he said we needed a moratorium "until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."

In a nutshell, that's the Sanders position on AI.

This might be the most poisonously stupid idea of the year.

The sheer destructiveness of it is on par, say, with blocking the creation of new generators after Thomas Edison set up the Pearl Street Station in 1882 on grounds that we didn't fully understand how electrification would affect cities. Or, prohibiting the mining of coal in Britain at the outset of the Industrial Revolution because the coming changes were too hard to fathom.

The comparison with the Industrial Revolution is apt. The benefits to Britain of leading the way were vast, in terms of economic growth, trade, the welfare of its people and national power.

There is a winner-take-all aspect to these sort of tech races. The company that takes the lead and gets people acclimated to its product earns revenues that it can plow back into further research and development. In so doing, it maintains its lead in the market.

Why wouldn't we want this company to be American rather than Chinese?

There will also be crucial military applications of AI. History says that a leg up in technical acumen can make the difference between victory and defeat. The Blitzkrieg swept all before because the Nazis had figured out how to wed innovations in mobility to advances in radio communications. The British, in turn, fended off the Nazi air assault in the Battle of Britain because they made maximum use of radar without the Germans realizing it.

Sanders wants us to take our chances ceding a technological advantage to China and hoping everything turns out OK. The Chinese may be communists -- whereas Sanders is just a socialist -- but even they aren't this foolish.

We are in the equivalent of a space race, and Sanders is talking about cutting off our supply of rocket fuel.

There may be cause eventually to regulate AI, but we don't even know how it's going to develop at the moment; we had to have the widespread adoption of cars before we had the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Even if Sanders were to get his way, there's no stopping AI. China and other foreign countries will continue to sprint ahead, and U.S. companies denied data centers here at home will go find them overseas.

McKinsey & Company estimates that $7 trillion will be invested in data centers globally by 2030, with 40% of that coming from the United States. This investment has already been a boon to the U.S. economy, making up for any weakness due to other factors. It'd be perverse to affirmatively seek to cut off a capital investment spigot that every other country in the world should envy.

The practical issues with data centers, primarily energy usage, are solvable by rationalizing our energy policies. It will be shame on us -- an energy behemoth -- if we can't figure out how to power the research that might create the defining innovations of our age.

As for Bernie Sanders, he calls himself a progressive. Yet, his troglodyte opposition to a potential productivity revolution shows that he's really the nation's foremost reactionary socialist.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)

(c) 2025 by King Features Syndicate