The Candidate Who Wants to Ban Data Centers: ‘This Screams Financial Crisis’
"I just have alarm bells going off in my head," says former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau staffer Alexis Goldstein
By Jack Crosbie
June 5, 2026

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I worked on Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis. All of the financial engineering that happened in 2008 feels like child’s play compared to the financial engineering that is backing the rise of data centers. The difference being that at the end of the day, in 2008 the asset that was behind all of the securitization was a house, and the asset that’s behind the securitization in all of the debt structures for data centers is a graphics card that ages like milk and is obsolete in two to three years. Everyone thought a house will always have value, and that turned out to be wrong, but I don’t think a GPU will always have value.

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So a healthy dose of skepticism is what I’m hoping to bring to Congress. I support AOC and Bernie Sanders’ data center moratorium, but I also think it doesn’t go far enough. Like everything about this screams financial crisis to me. They spent $1.4 trillion on data centers, and they’ve only earned $600 billion industry-wide, not even half as much as they spent. Meta did a bond issuance last year for $25 billion of corporate bonds to raise money to build more data centers. It was the largest corporate bond issuance in history, right? None of this is being paid for with anything but debt. And if you look at the sharks, and by that I mean, the hedge funds and the private equity funds that are financing this, it’s the same people as the 2008 financial crisis!

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Yeah, and it’s very bipartisan. I mean, in Maryland’s 6th, where I’m running, they’re trying to build data centers everywhere. They actually smell bad, which I didn’t realize until I visited one. Obviously they sound bad, but they smell bad, too. Nobody wants them. I think a lot of people are sleeping on the movement against them. It’s why those graduation videos — people are shocked that all of the graduates are booing someone who says AI is the future. I think Congress is really behind the curve on this, and if nothing else, I just want to talk about this as much as possible. I think I’m uniquely situated to talk about it, because I have the expertise from my finance background and work in government. I’m seeing the same hype cycle play out that I saw in crypto, and I’m like, guys, we just did this, and it didn’t end well. Shouldn’t we be a little more skeptical this time? And it doesn’t feel like our leaders are.

I sort of have a three point plan: number one, find the billionaire money, and that’s this bill that I worked on with AOC, that in 2021 passed the House Financial Services Committee, but then was never brought to the floor. Step two is take the billionaire money, and then step three is give it back to the people they took it from in the first place. I guess I’m kind of like the skunk at the garden party that’s always telling people “I think AI is a bubble, I think it’s going to crash.” I’m just a nerd, but I’m a nerd who has watched the same ostrich game over and over again from all these different perches.

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