The Sanders-AOC moratorium bill is getting framed as a potential win for offshore compute providers like Nebius. Freeze US data center construction, the logic goes, and demand shifts to whoever has non-US capacity. I almost went with that read. But then I looked at where Nebius is actually building, and the thesis fell apart. Nebius just got approval for a 1.2 GW campus in Independence, Missouri. It has a 300MW facility going up in New Jersey. It's planning in Birmingham, Alabama. Its two largest contracts (Microsoft at ~$19 billion, Meta at ~$27 billion) require US-based delivery. This isn't an offshore play hedging against American regulatory risk. Nebius IS the US build. A construction moratorium doesn't advantage Nebius. It freezes them.
Over 100 local communities have already enacted their own data center moratoriums. Twelve states have moratorium bills in session right now. The Sanders bill won't pass, but it gives political cover and framing language to every county board and state legislature that's already uncomfortable with what's happening to their power grid. The real constraint on US compute supply is a distributed permitting war, fought township by township. And that's much harder to lobby your way through.