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Silicon Valley eschatology — 1: Awaiting the end times

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“It saddened me to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchwords, had attained its hopes, to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the labourer of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal in perfect harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals which must meet a vast variety of needs and dangers have a share of intelligence.”
H. G. Wells – The Time Machine

Last November, Peter Robinson, host of the Uncommon Knowledge program at the libertarian Hoover Institution, hosted Peter Thiel under the headline, “Apocalypse Now.”

In the broadcast, subtitled “Peter Thiel on ancient prophecies and modern technology,” the founder of Palantir is introduced as a “leading technology entrepreneur and thinker” and shares his “views on the end times, technology, and societal progress.”

Robinson, who once served as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, asks Thiel, in a manner that feels like he is teeing him up, to explain why universities lack this “knowledge” as we head toward the “end times.”

Thiel responds:

“…I’ve put this in a number of other contexts, but my intuition is that there’s been a relative stagnation in many places. The over-specialization, the narrow experts telling you how great they are, it’s hiding a sort of decay where the cancer cell salesmen, the cancer researchers say they’re going to cure cancer in the next five years. And the string [theory] physicists say they’re the smartest physicists and they know everything. But maybe it’s this weird academic power game that’s blocking everybody else. Before you even get to the big question of history, there’s a question about the history of science and technology: Science and technology have progressed a lot. Maybe it’s progressing more slowly. Why did it change? What’s going on there?”

The conversation also turns to rationalism, and Thiel laments that scientists like Bacon no longer emerge, that hyper-specialization and rationalism do not produce “heroic” types. Stagnation, in his view, defines our era. Moreover, this is linked to the apocalypse, to Armageddon, to the “end times”: it might be possible to see signs like the emergence of the Antichrist, not in their literal sense, but in their secondary meanings. Perhaps the Antichrist is not a person but a system; communism, the “United States of Europe,” a one-world government… They could all be signs.¹

Thiel points out that when faced with a binary choice like the Antichrist versus Armageddon, everyone would naturally defend the “one world/one-world government against the Antichrist.” Nevertheless, he implies that both paths are bad and seems to propose, or appears to have proposed, a “third way.” What we see, however, is a rejection of the Enlightenment idea that is fond of hyper-rational masses/crowds:

“(…) I’m much more of the Lord Acton view that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And this would be a power that would be subject to no checks. There’d be nobody on the outside. It would be, in some sense, the biggest crowd, the biggest bubble.

This is probably a place where the Bible is different from enlightened rationality. Enlightened rationality believes in the wisdom of the crowd. The Bible believes in the madness of the crowd. And if you have a one-world state, which is in some sense the biggest crowd of all, it’s all of humanity turned in on itself.”

The host, Robinson, immediately retorts: “The global mob.” Thiel agrees.

Thiel wonders what would happen to, for instance, marginal tax rates in the event of the Antichrist’s appearance as a one-world state and global governance, and he answers his own question: “I think they’d be quite high. It would be something like East Germany with no escape.” He worries that people, frightened by destruction and the apocalypse, will be content with the Antichrist’s deception of peace and security. The promise of peace and security from a one-world state means high taxes.

Osama bin Laden vs. Locke

In fact, Thiel presents us, in his own subtle way, with a theme that repeatedly appears in the history of bourgeois civilization: the rational economic man of Adam Smith (and Karl Marx!) actually signifies the destruction of humanity through indolence, mediocrity, moderation, and lack of ambition. Progress has slowed because we have stopped asking questions about “human nature.” Yet, there is also an “old” tradition that views humans as uncanny, prone to violence, or at least dangerous creatures. Thiel proposes reviving this tradition. The Westphalian order, Hobbes’s preaching of escape from the state of nature where every man is a wolf to every other man; a cowardly life had become preferable to a heroic but meaningless death. The Enlightenment was a “strategic retreat”: to prevent people from killing each other, asking questions about human nature was now forbidden.

Clearly, we are faced with a secondhand Nietzsche (and perhaps Heidegger and Schmitt). The old traditions did not promise a right to life or freedom; man was to aim for virtue instead of happiness. He was drawing a connection between Locke and Hobbes’s escape from nature (the natural) and their praise of the pursuit of happiness, and capitalist accumulation. Locke, Hobbes, and Smith, with all their optimism, believed we would live in the tranquility of the capitalist paradise we built for ourselves.

Yet, despite all this talk of brotherhood, according to Thiel, Western civilization woke up to the 9/11 attacks at the beginning of the 21st century. September 11 was the moment peace was shattered. The non-Western world had not yet transitioned to the Westphalian order; the Enlightenment had reached these places unevenly; the American continent, free of religious wars, was shaken by them, and so on. What could the comfort-accustomed Westerner do against the fanatics from geographies where the afterlife is a blessing, who thirst for martyrdom? Osama bin Laden, however, was aware of the limits that liberal thinkers like Locke ignored:²

“Today, the instinct for self-preservation alone should compel us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that we have misleadingly called the Enlightenment.”

Dr. Thiel or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the apocalypse

The idea of embracing the apocalypse is not unique to Thiel; it can also be optimistic or pessimistic. We can say that both Silicon Valley’s techno-optimists and those who argue that the welfare state dulls human nature eagerly await Armageddon.

However, for Thiel, the real apocalypse lies in the naivety of the genteel classes who believe that life is heading toward the good and the beautiful, and that the rabble are, in fact, valuable creatures. He is essentially saying, “If you continue with this mindset, the rabble will rule.” It is likely with this pessimism that he quotes Schmitt:

“In Russia, before the Revolution, the doomed classes romanticized the Russian peasant as the good, brave, and Christian mujik. … The French aristocratic society before the Revolution of 1789 sentimentalized ‘the man who is good by nature’ and the virtues of the masses. … Nobody scented the revolution; it is incredible to see the security and the lack of suspicion with which this privileged group in 1793 spoke of the goodness, the gentleness, and the innocence of the people—a spectacle ridicule et terrible [a ridiculous and terrible spectacle].”

Schmitt’s “insistence on the political” and the rejection of universalism he found in the eschatological “you are either with Christ or against him” dichotomy of medieval Christianity should be counted among the 20th-century sources of Thiel’s love for the apocalypse. If Osama bin Laden is forcing the apocalypse with a Schmittian total enemy-making, then Western civilization must respond in the same tone. Therefore, 9/11 as an invitation to the apocalypse is a turning point for Thiel.

Thiel, who eagerly cites Schmitt—who envisioned an age where the representation of truth replaces truth itself—embraces the prophecy that this artificial world will require a “technical religion,” and that the brief harmony created by this “Babylonian unity” is the penultimate stop before the Apocalypse. The Antichrist, inspired by Schmitt, once again appears with the promise of security and peace and destroys humanity.

But Thiel still believes in a third way. The balance of terror created by technologies that could lead to unlimited destruction also opens a narrow path for humanity, caught between the Apocalypse and the Antichrist:³

“But I would always come back to the apocalyptic scenarios, the Antichrist or Armageddon. And I think there’s a lot in this runaway science technology that pushes us towards something like Armageddon. And then there’s a natural reaction against that, which is we’re going to escape Armageddon by having a single world state that has real power and real teeth. The biblical name for that is the Antichrist. And my Christian intuition is I don’t want the Antichrist, I don’t want Armageddon. I’d like to find this narrow path between the two where we can avoid both. And there are ways, of course, to put it off, to try new things, if possible.”

Thiel’s train of thought is as follows: The West has lost faith in itself. But thanks to this loss of faith, immense commercial and creative forces were unleashed; and because of this same loss of faith, the West has left itself defenseless. The question, then, is this: Is there a way to strengthen the modern West without completely destroying it, to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

The answers to this are varied. In this series of articles, we will touch upon some of the reactions of property owners to the terror created by the idea of the end times. But Thiel does not hide his admiration for the “freedom” of the American founding fathers. Americans before the U.S. Constitution seem much freer than those after it. He recalls Leo Strauss: “Even the most just society cannot survive without ‘intelligence, i.e., espionage,’” but “espionage is impossible without a suspension of certain rules of natural right.” Thiel seems to approve:

“Instead of the United Nations, with its endless and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination body of the world’s intelligence services, as the way toward a truly global pax Americana.”

The moment of truth created by Trump and Apokálypsis

When Donald Trump first took the presidential office in 2016, Barack Obama, referring to the apocalypse, said, “It’s not the end of the world…”

According to Thiel, Obama was right in the literal sense of the word. But if we look at its meaning in ancient Greek, apokálypsis (unveiling, revelation), the same could not be said for a second Trump term:

“Apokálypsis is the most peaceful way to decide the war the old guard waged against the internet, which the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the guardians of pre-internet secret knowledge the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC)—the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally limited public discourse. In retrospect, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison in 2019 with the death in custody of the financier and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Almost half of Americans polled that year did not trust the official story that Epstein had committed suicide, which showed that the DISC had lost its total control over the narrative.”

Let’s set aside the irony symbolized by the great fiasco Trump, whom Thiel supported, caused his own base in the Epstein case. After conflating a range of issues from the Kennedy assassination to COVID-19 conspiracies, he believed they had finally and irreversibly consigned their own ancien régime to the dustbin of history. There would be no “reactionary restoration” of the “pre-internet past.”

The future required “fresh and unusual ideas.” New ideas could have saved the old regime, which, far from answering our deepest questions, “barely even considered them,” but this is no longer possible. Among these questions were the reasons for the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the U.S., rising real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt. Thiel believed they had captured a moment of truth with the apokálypsis created by Trump. Therefore, it was more meaningful to deal with Epstein than with the American founding fathers and their slavery and colonialism. It was more correct to focus on COVID-19 than to cast stones at the year 1619, when the first African slave set foot on the American continent. One doesn’t need to be a genius to understand that what is implied here is the rehabilitation of slavery, colonialism, and the American exceptionalism embodied in manifest destiny. How else can the comfort-accustomed, indolent Westerners deal with the non-Westerners who seem like a sacrificial generation?

The fear of dispossession in humans, especially property-owning humans, and the hatred for bourgeois civilization, which can be summarized as “You unleashed this mob/rabble upon us!”, finds its expression in a roughly Nietzschean-inspired aristocratic rebellion.

Here, cultural fear mixes with biological fear. The Social Darwinist and Malthusian pessimistic omens of apocalypse, which we will lay out in the next part of the series, are resurrected once again.

The Time Traveller, the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, describes the people he sees in the year 802,701, where he travels with his invention. On the surface, there is the Eloi race, living in apparent joy and carelessness; on the other hand, there are the Morlocks, living underground without seeing the light of day, working in filthy jobs, and at some point in history, turning to cannibalism. It is such a dystopia that the propertied and the propertyless have, at some future moment, become two separate races, but contrary to the initial harmony, they are trapped in a decline where the numerically superior underground race now eats the genteel inhabitants of the surface. The propertied have become so accustomed to comfort that the paradise they live in is actually summoning the apocalypse. Humanity has progressed so much that the human race has biologically regressed.

The Silicon Valley elites, including Thiel, consider these apocalyptic scenarios a warning and are seeking an economic, geographic, and—what amounts to the same thing for them—biological escape for themselves (that is, for those like them, the property owners).

¹ So much so that at one point in the dialogue, Thiel, referring to an old novel by the English Catholic priest Robert Hugh Benson, Lord of the World, which Robinson brings up, says, “The Antichrist is a Jewish socialist senator from Vermont.” Bernie Sanders is the senator from Vermont.

² I must also say that Thiel resorts to various clever tricks to prove our “irrational” nature. Our Silicon Valley philosopher, reminding us that bin Laden became rich with the 20th-century oil boom, puts forward a strange thesis: “Since most of the value of oil is simply in the ground, the ‘labor’ that people add to it by extracting and refining it is proportionally small. And yet, at the same time, economies rise and fall on the price of crude oil, so much so that it constitutes a significant fraction of the world’s wealth.” Extracting oil, transporting it, refining it, using it in energy production, transportation, or financial assets… All of this supposedly requires “proportionally small” labor.

³ Thiel, who is fond of biblical language, is likely alluding to Luke 13:24: “Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.”

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The system that needed Lindsey Graham

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13/07/2026

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Thomas Karat, behavior analyst

The senator died Saturday night of an aortic dissection, at seventy-one, in the middle of a campaign for a fifth term. His communications director cited the medical examiner’s preliminary finding: a rupture in the body’s largest artery, the consequence of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The tributes arrived within hours. Trump called him a true American patriot. Volodymyr Zelensky, who had met him twice in the preceding week, called him a friend who was there when it was needed most. Mark Rutte and Benjamin Netanyahu sent their own. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said there were no words to describe Graham’s impact on the foreign and domestic policy of the United States.

There are words. The obituaries have chosen the wrong ones, and in doing so they have skipped the only question worth asking about a man like this. Not whether he was sincere in his convictions — he was, exhaustingly so — but how a senator whose reflexive answer to every foreign crisis was force spent twenty-three years being handed the committee seats, the airtime, and the ear of four presidents that let him act on it. Graham was not an aberration the system tolerated. He was a product the system manufactured, promoted, and kept in stock because he was useful.

Consider the shape of the career. In March 2003, as the bombs fell on Baghdad, Graham told the country that past disagreements should give way to a shared commitment to see the effort through. The war he blessed that day killed more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians by the most conservative direct-death counts, birthed the insurgency that became ISIS, and left the country a wreck. He drew no lesson from it. When Libya was broken open in 2011 and left to its warlords, he had backed the intervention. When Syria was pulled apart, he had wanted deeper involvement. Across two decades, the country would be devastated, and Graham’s response to each devastation was to locate the next one.

By February of this year the next one was Iran. On the twenty-sixth, under his own Senate letterhead, Graham published an essay that reads now like a confession left in plain sight. Iran, he wrote, was facing a Berlin Wall moment. The regime was at its weakest point since 1979, and his ultimate hope was that regime change would be achieved. He described the October 7 attacks, in his own phrasing — as a silver lining, because the Israeli campaign that followed had degraded Iran’s military. He praised Trump for pursuing, in his words, peace, not war, in the same paragraphs that celebrated a bombing campaign already under way. The strikes had a name: Operation Midnight Hammer. Graham called it the largest opportunity for peace and prosperity in the Middle East in over a thousand years.

He said the quiet part in Tel Aviv, to reporters, on February 16, less than two weeks before the strikes began. The United States was on the verge of eliminating the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the region. On Fox News, days into the war, he offered the ledger in its rawest form: when the regime goes down, he said, there would be a new Middle East, and the United States would make a tremendous amount of money. Venezuela and Iran held nearly a third of the world’s known oil reserves, he noted, and the point of the exercise was a partnership with those reserves. Regime change as a real-estate transaction. He had made the trip to Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia the week before to reaffirm, he wrote, that all of it was attainable and would be extremely beneficial to the United States. Weeks earlier he had met with Mossad, telling reporters they would tell him things his own government would not.

None of this cost him anything. That is the part the eulogies cannot hold in view, because to hold it in view is to indict the institutions doing the eulogizing. A senator who spent a career being wrong about the consequences of American force — wrong about Iraq, wrong about Libya, wrong about what would follow the fall of every regime he wanted to fall — was never demoted for it. He was promoted. The record of his committee assignments tells the story in the driest possible language. For years he sat on the Armed Services Committee, from which he lectured the Senate that its love for the troops bought nothing, that only appropriations did, that a colleague worried about the budget was out of touch with the world. By the time of his death he chaired the Budget Committee and sat on Appropriations — the panels that write the numbers and bless the spending. The man who wanted every war was placed, again and again, on the committees that pay for them.

Follow the money and the shape sharpens further. Graham’s donors, across a career documented in Federal Election Commission filings, clustered where his positions pointed. The defense contractors — the makers of the aircraft, the missiles, the systems — routed money to his committees and his leadership PACs. The specific career totals sit behind a paywall that blocks automated verification, and so no single figure belongs in this account. But the pattern needs no exact number to be legible. A senator who votes for every weapons system, who calls insufficient defense spending an emergency, who treats the reduction of the military budget as a moral failure, is a senator worth funding for the people who build the weapons. The contributions were not a bribe. They did not need to be. They were an investment in a man who already believed, and who sat where belief could be converted into contracts.

The media completed the machine. Graham was a fixture of the Sunday shows and the cable green rooms for a reason that had nothing to do with wisdom and everything to do with format. He was quotable, available, and reliably hawkish, which made him the perfect guest for programs that reward certainty over accuracy and confrontation over reflection. The pipeline ran in both directions. The airtime made him a national figure, and being a national figure got him more airtime, and the whole apparatus rewarded the escalation it claimed only to be covering. When he called for bombing Iran regardless of Iran’s involvement in a given attack, and told Israel to finish the job, the remarks drew condemnation abroad and bookings at home. The market for a war hawk was deep, and he supplied it.

What made Graham durable was that his convictions never had to survive an election of ideas, only the tolerance of the institutions that housed them. He denounced Trump in 2015 as a race-baiting xenophobic bigot and a jackass, and by his second term was among the president’s most consistent defenders, having discovered that proximity to power mattered more than the content of the man wielding it. The pitch that helped start this year’s war was delivered, according to reporting on the strikes, over rounds of golf. Iran was a spoiler for everything Trump wanted, Graham told him; collapse the regime and it would be Berlin Wall stuff. The president was persuaded. The bombs fell. And when a reporter asked Graham what the plan was for the day after — the question that Iraq should have burned into every hawk in Washington — he answered that it was not his job to know. The future of Iran, he said, was for the Iranian people to determine. He had wanted the war. The consequences belonged to someone else.

That was always the arrangement. The wars were his to advocate and never his to own. He would appear on the morning shows to demand them, sit on the committees to fund them, take the money from the firms that profited from them, and when they curdled into the next disaster he would be on television again, demanding the next one, his authority somehow enhanced rather than diminished by the wreckage behind him. This is not the biography of an outlier. It is the biography of an incentive structure, wearing a man’s face.

He died with the seat already in motion. Within hours, before any burial, the reporting had turned to the scramble to replace him, to the governor who will name a temporary successor, to what his absence means for a Republican majority counting every vote. Trump told NBC he already had someone in mind. The machine that made Lindsey Graham did not pause to mourn him. It began, immediately, to fill the vacancy — because the position he occupied was never really about the man. It was about keeping the seat filled by someone who would say what he said. There is no shortage of applicants. That is the dread the eulogies are built to keep you from feeling. He is gone, and nothing that produced him has changed.

***

Thomas Karat has spent a career in multinational technology corporations and is a behavior analyst holding a Master’s in Science and Communication from Manchester Metropolitan University. His work focuses on the psychology of language in power dynamics, and his graduate thesis examined linguistic deception markers in high-stakes business negotiations. He hosts a YT podcast, SaltCubeAnalytics, and publishes at karat.substack.com

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Trump financial disclosures show millions invested in major defense contractors, analysis reveals

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10/07/2026

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US President Donald Trump’s financial disclosures released last week reveal that he has invested millions of dollars in approximately a dozen companies, including weapons manufacturers and defense contractors, according to a news analysis by Responsible Statecraft. The analysis shows that Trump, through investment firms representing him, acquired shares in defense sector companies valued at a total of between $9.7 million and $24.3 million.

The companies receiving investment included Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics.

According to the financial disclosures, the investment firms managing Trump’s assets invested between $1.6 million and $3.9 million in the data analytics and artificial intelligence company Palantir.

The analysis noted that Palantir developed the AI-powered Maven Smart System, which is utilized in US military operations in the war with Iran. The same analysis also claimed that the company contributed to the development of software named “Big Daddy,” which is used in Israeli military operations in Gaza.

Trump’s portfolio also includes shares in Boeing. The analysis stated that Boeing sold F-15 fighter jets valued at $8.6 billion to Israel less than three months before Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initiated their joint war against Iran.

According to the financial disclosures, Trump also invested in GE Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and RTX, the manufacturer of Tomahawk missiles.

The analysis wrote that weapons produced by these companies were heavily used in the war with Iran, including Tomahawk missiles used in a US Air Force strike on a primary school in the Iranian city of Minab. The report stated that at least 168 children lost their lives in this attack.

According to Responsible Statecraft, the majority of these companies received new contracts from the Pentagon aimed at replenishing US missile stockpiles depleted during the war with Iran.

RTX signed a $373 million contract for 23 Standard Missile-3 IB interceptor missiles, while Lockheed Martin was reported to have secured a $35 billion contract intended to quadruple its production of the THAAD missile defense system.

The financial disclosures showed that Trump’s investment firms also invested in shares of Kratos Defense, Honeywell, Howmet Aerospace, L3Harris, and TransDigm.

Responsible Statecraft noted that the shares of these companies gained significant value within a year of Trump returning to office. According to the analysis, in 2025, Palantir shares rose by 135%, Kratos shares by 188%, GE Aerospace shares by 84%, and RTX shares by 61%.

In April, Trump posted on Truth Social, stating: “Palantir Technologies has proven to have very powerful capabilities and equipment on the battlefield. Ask our enemies!” Following the post, the company’s shares reportedly rose by approximately 3% within a few minutes.

Financial records showed that Trump generated more than $2 billion in income in 2025. Responsible Statecraft wrote that this amount is “unprecedented” for a sitting US president.

According to the report, the majority of this income was derived from investments linked to cryptocurrency companies such as World Liberty Financial and Binance. Trump reportedly earned hundreds of millions of dollars from “memecoins” launched through these companies, though these crypto assets later suffered sharp declines in value, resulting in losses for numerous investors.

The analysis stated that Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE National Security Advisor and brother of the UAE President and Foreign Minister, invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial and $2 billion in Binance. Trump subsequently approved the export of advanced AI chips to the UAE, a decision that the analysis indicated created the impression of being linked to the crypto investments.

According to the analysis, Donald Trump Jr. is also connected to companies operating in the unmanned aerial vehicle and defense technology sectors. Trump Jr. is a major shareholder and advisory board member at Unusual Machines, which manufactures drone components, while his investment firm also holds stakes in Powerus and Vulcan Elements, both of which hold Pentagon contracts.

Trump Jr. serves on the board of Powerus, which markets drone systems used to intercept Iranian missiles to Gulf countries, and Eric Trump is reported to hold a financial interest in the same company.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, evaluated the situation, saying: “These countries are under great pressure to buy from the president’s sons. In this way, the president will do what they want.”

When asked last year about potential conflicts of interest arising from Trump’s business activities, White House Spokesperson Anna Kelly responded: “There are no conflicts of interest.” Trump also acknowledged the existence of conflicts of interest in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, but argued they were not important, saying: “I realized that nobody cares.”

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US Democrats split over proposed data center moratoriums amid rising energy and climate concerns

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3 days ago

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10/07/2026

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Democrats in the United States increasingly view the rapid expansion of data centers as a critical challenge, yet the party remains deeply divided over how to address the issue.

For many Democrats, the immense energy consumption of these facilities—which drives up household electricity bills and exacerbates climate change—makes some form of restriction an inevitable policy option. The growing public unpopularity of these centers raises the political stakes for Democrats, who are seeking solutions to protect their prospects in this year’s midterm elections on promises of lowering the cost of living.

Last month, Representative Frank Pallone Jr., the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called for a moratorium on data center construction. However, senior party leadership has shown little enthusiasm for the proposal.

These internal divisions are also playing out at the state level, where at least two Democratic-controlled legislatures have passed data center moratoriums. One of those measures was vetoed, while the other is currently awaiting the governor’s signature.

Support for restricting data centers does not align strictly along traditional ideological lines. A faction of anti-establishment Republicans has backed such efforts, while other members of the Republican Party continue to debate how, or even if, to regulate the massive server farms powering the artificial intelligence boom.

In Congress, Democratic leaders have repeatedly argued that data centers must pay their fair share of rising energy costs.

Earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stated that Democrats would push for “strong, enforceable consumer protections.”

Similarly, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries expressed support for technological innovation while emphasizing, “We must ensure we are protecting the American consumer.”

However, neither leader has endorsed a specific legislative proposal to achieve these objectives. Requests for comment sent to the offices of Schumer and Jeffries went unanswered.

Jeffries also told Politico that halting data center development is “certainly not a position I am articulating at this time.”

In contrast, influential progressive figures, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, argue that a total moratorium on data center construction is necessary.

In March, these lawmakers introduced legislation that would ban the construction of new data centers until Congress enacts a suite of AI safety measures, ranging from government audits of AI models to protections against mass layoffs.

Pallone voiced strong support for the concept last month during a subcommittee hearing on a separate data center bill, stating he favored “a national AI data center moratorium until we can figure out a way that this is not going to harm our nation’s air, water, and utility bills.”

Following his remarks, Pallone added: “The reality is that everything with these data centers is moving so quickly, and I am concerned about the impact on electricity consumers and the environment.”

The Data Center Coalition, an industry group backed by several major technology companies, argued that a national moratorium would deter investment in the US, damage the economy, and “send the wrong message to other industries.”

“A federal mandate to halt data center construction risks restricting access to cloud and digital services, undermines our global competitiveness, and would have significant consequences for Americans’ daily lives,” the group said in a statement in late June.

Maxwell Shulman, a policy research analyst at Beacon Policy Advisors, suggested that the primary force driving the recent push for moratoriums is a “general hostility toward AI and Big Tech.”

“People see many of these changes. They are worried about AI. They are worried about the economy and their jobs, and they feel there is very little they can do about it,” Shulman said. “They view data centers not only as the physical embodiment of AI, but also as one of the rare areas where they can actually have a say or fight back.”

Shulman added: “I think moratoriums are a blunt but effective tool to demonstrate this opposition or concern toward AI in general, not just data centers.”

Meanwhile, a narrower, bipartisan bill has been gaining momentum in Congress.

The Electricity Consumers Protection Act, led by Representative Kathy Castor, a Democrat, and Representative Gabe Evans, a Republican, would require state utility regulators to establish rules ensuring that ordinary Americans do not foot the bill for new power generation and transmission lines built to support high-load consumers like data centers.

The bill passed the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee in late June and is scheduled for consideration by the full committee.

Castor said Congress should begin by establishing regulatory safeguards, though she did not rule out supporting a construction halt in the future.

“People want guardrails. They do not want their electricity bills to go up, and they are worried about water,” Castor said last month.

When asked about her stance on a moratorium, Castor added: “If we reach a point where these guardrails are not put in place and companies simply ignore them, we will have to move to that stage.”

At the state level, Democratic governors have blocked or slowed legislative efforts to limit data center expansion. In Maine, the legislature passed a bill to ban new data center construction for 18 months, but Governor Janet Mills vetoed the measure because it did not exempt an ongoing $550 million project.

New York lawmakers passed a one-year data center moratorium in June, which is currently awaiting action from Governor Kathy Hochul. According to a report by Politico, Hochul is instead considering an executive order for a shorter, six-month halt.

Other Democratic governors have actively opposed data center moratoriums.

“Walking away from a technology that will continue to propagate is leaving the table,” Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat from Virginia, told Politico this week.

In California, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required planned data centers to estimate their water usage.

As broad moratoriums encounter resistance, state-level Democratic leaders are turning to more targeted solutions, such as reassessing data center tax credits. In Illinois, Democratic Governor JB Pritzker announced in June that the state would suspend its tax incentives for data centers due to energy and water concerns.

Some Republicans have adopted a similar approach. In May, Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine instructed state officials to temporarily halt the evaluation of new tax exemption requests while lawmakers review data center growth in the state.

In Virginia, lawmakers kept data center tax incentives intact after prolonged budget debates that forced a special legislative session. Spanberger instead supported the introduction of a new tax on electricity consumption.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Governor Mikie Sherrill signed legislation this week that places data centers into a separate category of electricity consumers. The governor’s office stated that the measure will ensure data centers pay for their own energy use and the associated infrastructure.

Commenting on the dynamics facing state leaders, Shulman said: “There is a massive amount of investment potential and a lot of potential jobs at stake. And I really think these Democratic governors do not want to shoot their own states in the foot in the race to capture these jobs.”

Shulman added: “The goal for a Democratic governor is to send a policy signal strong enough to make voters feel they are taking a tough stance on AI, or addressing its potential negative consequences, while still trying to attract as much investment and as many jobs as possible.”

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