Senator Josh Hawley has emerged as a leading Republican voice against AI and data centers. This week, he urged his fellow Senate Republicans to make legislative moves before they lose the majority in six weeks. Among his plans was a call for a moratorium on data centers—a temporary legal pause on construction, approval or expansion of data centers.
Data center moratoriums have been a hot topic in Congress this year. Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put forward the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, with the support of several other Democrats. Jason Williamson, CEO of AI startup MythWorx and assistant professor of data science at the University of Virginia, said the 2026 midterms, like every election, is about the economy.
Communities across the country are feeling the impacts of data centers. Critics say the massive power demand has driven up utility costs and threatened to destroy land and pollute surrounding air and waterways. And of course the noise in some areas is unbearable.
Residents also have pushed back against local leaders for lack of transparency in data center deals and want to hold tech companies accountable for promises to create jobs. "There are a handful of opportunities for what I refer to as common sense legislation," Williamson told Newsweek. "The Republican Party absolutely needs some wins over the next two years and this will be one of them." Hawley has been as a leading voice among his party for holding AI companies and data center developers accountable.
This call to action, while aligned with his previous positions, comes in reaction to major Republican losses in swing and deep red states. He cosponsored the Guaranteeing Rate Insulation from Data Centers (GRID) Act in February of this year along with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. The bill is meant to prevent data centers from driving up energy costs by requiring them to have their own power source as not to pass along costs to the consumers.
It would also establish new transparency measures for data centers to publicly disclose their current and future utility usage. This is unacceptable,” Hawley said in a statement at the time. Hawley, who serves as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Disaster Management, also launched an investigation into OpenAI following the Hugging Face incident in July.
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