Analysts suggest that the Democratic Party’s sweeping midterm election victory and takeover of both houses of Congress could slow down the pace of artificial intelligence development in the US, with implications for both the global AI trade and the technology rivalry between Washington and Beijing.
The assessment comes as concerns about AI and the data centres that power it proved to be a contributing factor in the backlash against the Republican Party and US President Donald Trump, a vocal supporter of the tech industry. Nationwide exit polls conducted by NBC News showed that 56 per cent of voters considered AI and data centres a “crucial” or “major” factor in their congressional vote, with about 64 per cent of that group being Democrats. While AI and data centres ranked behind issues such as cost of living and government corruption in salience, analysts said the technology had become politically significant in a short period of time.
In September, former researchers from frontier AI companies such as Anthropic issued dire warnings about the existential risks posed by advanced AI systems, spurring calls among some experts and industry executives for a global slowdown in AI development.
Gary Ng Cheuk-yan, a senior economist at Natixis Corporate and Investment Bank, said a slowdown in the US could be a win for China. He stated that while the election results will not bring data centre construction in the US to a complete halt, the pace will "definitely slow." Ng added that control of Congress by the Democrats, who are generally more supportive of stricter scrutiny of data centres, was likely to introduce new constraints on US computing capacity. He said, “This would keep [US] AI token prices high, giving China an opportunity to export cost-effective inference services, supported by abundant electricity supplies.”
A Democratic-controlled Congress is also expected to pursue regulations that could directly slow frontier AI research and development amid growing concerns about AI safety. In the Senate, incoming new faces such as Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed have publicly called for a pause on AI development. During his election campaign, El-Sayed released a comprehensive AI policy platform that included a ban on recursive self-improvement, a technique being aggressively pursued by frontier AI companies globally that involves using AI to build even better AI systems.
