Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and right-wing Gov. Ron DeSantis agree on virtually nothing. But they found common ground this year as leading skeptics of the artificial intelligence industry’s data center boom.

The alignment of two national figures on the left and right signals that a political reckoning is brewing over the AI industry’s impact on electricity prices, grid stability and the labor market. The opposition could slow the industry’s development plans if it reaches a broad bipartisan consensus.

Sanders, I-VT, has called for a national moratorium on data center construction.

“Frankly, I think you’ve got to slow this process down,” Sanders told CNN in a Dec. 28 interview. “It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us it’s coming — you adapt. What are they talking about? They’re going to guarantee healthcare to all people? What are they going to do when people have no jobs?”

Florida Gov. DeSantis unveiled an AI bill of rights on Dec. 4 that would protect local communities’ right to block data center construction among other provisions. The staunch Republican’s proposal could run afoul of the White House, which is pushing to scale up AI as quickly as possible. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Dec. 11 to prevent “excessive state regulation” of AI.

“We have a limited grid. You do not have enough grid capacity in the United States to do what they’re trying to do,” DeSantis said of the AI industry’s data center plans at an event in The Villages, Florida.

“As more and more information has gotten out, do you want a hyperscale data center in The Villages? Yes or no,” the governor asked. “I think most people would say they don’t want it.”

DeSantis is finishing out his second term as Florida’s governor and his future political ambitions are unclear. Sanders has said his fourth term as Vermont’s senator will likely be his last.

Florida and Vermont are not major data center states. But rising utility bills played a key role in the landslide victory of Democrat Abigail Spanberger in the governor’s race this year in Virginia, the world’s largest data center market.

Residential electricity prices are forecast to rise another 4% on average nationwide in 2026 after increasing about 5% in 2025, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

With cost of living at the center of American politics, the impact of data centers on local communities will likely play a role in the mid-term elections next November.

“We have gone from a period where data centers were sort of seen as an unmitigated good and as an engine of growth by a lot of elected officials and policymakers to people now recognizing that we’re short,” said Abe Silverman, who served as general counsel for the public utility board in New Jersey from 2019 until 2023 under Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy.

“We do not have enough generation to reliably serve existing customers and data centers,” Silverman said.

The shortage is most acute on the nation’s largest grid, PJM Interconnection, where data center demand is pushing the system to a tipping point. The grid will be six gigawatts short of its reliability requirement by 2027, according to PJM.

The power shortage is nearly equivalent to the electricity demand of Philadelphia, Silverman said. This makes blackouts more likely, he said. “Instead of a blackout happening every one in 10 years, we’re looking at something more often,” the analyst said.

“It’s at a crisis stage right now. PJM has never been this short,” said Joe Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, which serves as the independent market monitor for PJM.

PJM Interconnection serves more than 65 million people across 13 states in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. It includes pivotal swing states for the mid-term elections like Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The price to secure power capacity in PJM has exploded in recent years with $23 billion attributable to data centers, according to watchdog Monitoring Analytics. Those costs are ultimately passed on to consumers. This amounts to a “massive wealth transfer,” the watchdog told PJM in a November letter.

“I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the political repercussions,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm.

“And with a lot more elections in 2026 than 2025, we’ll see a lot of implications,” Gramlich said. “Every politician is going to be saying that they have the answer to affordability and their opponents’ policies would raise rates.”

The shortage will be exacerbated by Trump’s recent decision to pause all offshore wind farms under construction off the East Coast, Silverman said. This includes Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, a massive 2.6 gigawatt project that would help supply the huge data center market in northern Virginia.

“By stopping a project that had line of sight to coming online in the very near future, you are directly increasing the prices that we all pay for electricity and not by a little bit,” Silverman said. “That’s a huge, huge additional hole that we now have to dig out of.”

Data centers are facing pushback on multiple fronts now. The PJM watchdog has called for the grid to reject data centers that it does not have the power to serve or require them to bring their own generation. Virginia’s utility regulator is now requiring data centers to pay a majority of the cost of new transmission and generation that serves them beginning in 2027.

Data center developers next year will likely start moving to build more power plants onsite, called co-location, as they struggle to secure supply on the grid quickly, said Brian Fitzsimons, CEO of GridUnity, a company that uses software to help utilities navigate connection requests.

But Silverman said “co-location” has problems that will also face political scrutiny.

“Co-location is effectively taking a generator off the market,” he said. “It would be unethical to end up with a situation where data centers are able to buy private power plants that expose the rest of us to a greater chance of blackouts.”

Tesla has filed a motion to appeal the verdict in a product liability and wrongful death lawsuit that could cost the company $242.5 million if it is not reduced or overturned.

Elon Musk’s automaker has asked for the verdict to be tossed or for a new trial in Florida’s Southern district court.

Gibson Dunn, which is representing Tesla in the appeal, argued that compensatory damages in the case should be steeply reduced from $129 million to $69 million at most. That would result in Tesla having to pay a $23 million award if the prior verdict holding the company partially liable for the crash stands up.

The firm also argued that punitive damages should be eliminated or reduced to, at most, three times compensatory damages due to a statutory cap in the state of Florida.

The suit focused on a fatal crash that occurred in 2019 in Key Largo, Florida, in which George McGee was driving his Tesla Model S sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.

While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way.

McGee’s Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.

The collision killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides and severely injured her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.

A jury in a Miami federal court earlier this month said that Tesla should compensate the family of the deceased and the injured survivor, paying a $242.5 million portion of a total $329 million in damages that they decided were appropriate.

In their motion to appeal, Tesla’s lawyers argue that the Model S vehicle had no design defects, and that even alleged design defects could not be blamed for the crash, which they say was caused entirely by the driver.

“For as long as drivers remain at the wheel, any safety feature may embolden a few reckless drivers while enhancing safety for countless others,” the appeal states. “Holding Tesla liable for providing drivers with advanced safety features just because a reckless driver overrode them cannot be reconciled with Florida law.”

Tesla did not respond to a request for additional comment.

Brett Schreiber, lead trial counsel for the plaintiffs in this case, said in a statement that he believes the court will uphold the prior verdict, which should not be seen as “an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry, but of Tesla’s reckless and unsafe development and deployment of its Autopilot system.”  

“The jury heard all the facts and came to the right conclusion that this was a case of shared responsibility but that does not discount the integral role Autopilot and the company’s misrepresentations of its capabilities played in the crash,” he said.

Solar energy is booming across the U.S. and, for the first time, Florida is catching up to industry powerhouses Texas and California.

Despite removing climate change from its official state policy in 2024, Florida added more utility-scale solar than California last year, with over 3 gigawatts of new capacity coming online. 

“This is not a fluke,” said Sylvia Leyva Martinez, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “Florida is now shaping national solar growth.”

The surge is being driven by utilities, not rooftop panels. Florida Power & Light alone built over 70% of the state’s new solar last year. A state rule lets developers skip lengthy siting reviews for projects under 75 megawatts, which speeds up construction and cuts costs.

“There’s no silver bullet,” said Syd Kitson, founder of Babcock Ranch, a town designed to be powered almost entirely by solar. “But one thing Florida got right is acceptance. Here, people want solar. And we’re proving it works.”

Babcock Ranch runs on its own microgrid and stayed online during Hurricane Ian in 2022, while much of southwest Florida went dark.

“We didn’t lose power, internet, or water,” said Don Bishop, a homeowner there. “That changes how you think about energy.”

The economics are doing the rest. With industrial demand rising and natural gas prices climbing, solar is increasingly the cheapest option, even without subsidies.

“Utilities aren’t building solar because it’s green,” Martinez said. “They’re doing it because it’s cheaper.”

But new challenges are emerging.

In July, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, which accelerates the rollback of solar and wind tax credits. Homeowners lose the federal investment credit after 2025. Developers face tighter deadlines and stricter sourcing rules.

“It won’t kill the market,” said Zoë Gaston, an analyst who follows the solar industry at Wood Mackenzie. “But it makes the math harder.”

Analysts now expect a 42% drop in rooftop solar installs in Florida over the next five years. And while utility-scale growth continues, grid constraints are becoming an issue. Utilities are pouring money into storage, smart infrastructure, and grid upgrades to keep up.

Babcock Ranch is piloting new microgrid systems to add resilience. The hope is that other communities can take the playbook and adapt it, storm-proofing neighborhoods one block at a time.

“We’ve been testing this for years,” Kitson said. “Now it’s about scale. It’s about showing others they can do it too.”

The bigger question is whether Florida can keep this momentum going without policy support, and while still leaning heavily on natural gas.

“Florida has the solar resources,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor at Stanford’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “What’s missing is political consistency.”

Watch the video to see how Florida became a solar leader and what could slow it down.

Tesla is facing a crucial verdict in a personal injury trial over a fatal Autopilot crash in 2019, the first time Elon Musk’s automaker has been in front of a jury on such a matter in federal court.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs on Thursday asked the jury to award damages of around $345 million. That includes $109 million in compensatory damages and $236 million in punitive damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.

The suit centers around who shoulders the blame for a deadly crash that occurred in 2019 in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.

While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. He accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.

Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.

The plaintiffs have included Benavides’ surviving family members, and Angulo, who testified in the trial. Angulo is seeking compensation for his medical expenses and pain and suffering, while Benavides’ estate is suing for wrongful death, pain and suffering, and other punitive damages.

Lawyers representing the plaintiffs argued that Tesla’s partially automated driving systems, marketed as Autopilot at the time, had dangerous defects, which should have been known and fixed by the company, and that use of Autopilot should have been limited to roads where it could perform safely.

They also argued that Musk and Tesla made false statements to customers, shareholders and the public, overstating the safety benefits and capabilities of Autopilot, which encouraged drivers to overly rely on it.

In opening arguments and throughout the trial, the plaintiffs’ attorneys and expert witnesses cited a litany of Musk’s past promises about Autopilot and Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology. The lawyers said

Tesla attorneys countered in court that the company had communicated directly with customers about how to use Autopilot and other features, and that McGee’s driving was to blame for the collision. They said in closing arguments that Tesla works to develop technology to save drivers’ lives, and that a ruling against the EV maker would send the wrong message.

The Benavides family had previously sued McGee and settled with him. McGee was charged in October 2019 with careless driving and didn’t contest the charges.

While Tesla has typically been able to settle cases or move Autopilot-related suits into arbitration and out of the public eye, Judge Beth Bloom in the Miami court wrote, in an order in early July, that the case could move ahead to trial.

“A reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit,” she wrote in that order.

For closing arguments on Thursday, the Benavides family and Angulo were in the courtroom. They looked away from screens anytime a video or picture of the scene of the crash was displayed.

— NBC News’ Maria Piñero reported from Miami.

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