The Candidate Who Wants to Ban Data Centers: ‘This Screams Financial Crisis’

By Jack Crosbie

Jack Crosbie

Alexis Goldstein has a simple pitch to American voters. Let her take out the data centers. 

There’s more to it, of course. Goldstein has a long background in the finance and tech worlds, and a host of ideas on where public money that’s being used for tax breaks to Big tech should be spent. But the core of her campaign for Maryland’s 6th congressional district revolves around the clear image of a humming, reeking building soaking up cash in a needy community, hoarding its wealth in bytes of zeroes and ones.

The district is currently represented by April McClain Delaney, whose husband, John Delaney, represented it from 2013 to 2019. Goldstein is one of several Democrats hoping to knock off Delaney in the party primary later this month, and one of several former federal workers running for Congress after experiencing Donald Trump’s administration from the inside.

Goldstein was fired from her job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by job-cutters at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Before getting the axe, she worked to protect Americans from crypto scams — work that she says is only more relevant now in the days of AI. 

Goldstein spoke with Rolling Stone by phone this week about her campaign and what she’d want to accomplish in office. 

When was the moment you decided you were going to run for office?

One of the things I did at the CFPB is I worked on fighting crypto scams. I have a degree in computer science, and I’m extremely online. In 2025, when the CFPB was very much under attack, there was a vote in the House of Representatives for a bill called the Genius Act, and then there was another bill called the Clarity Act. Essentially, [the bills] loosened the rules on all of crypto, and say there is a magic entity that doesn’t have to obey the same financial rules as every other financial product. April McClain Delaney, who is the incumbent in the 6th congressional district, voted for both of them. I was frustrated with every Democrat that voted for it, but having someone that is from the state that has lost the most federal jobs… it’s like we were fighting for our lives and here was this vote that couldn’t pass without Democratic support, and they demanded nothing for it. 

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What would you be most excited to try to change if you were elected to Congress?

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. 

As someone who worked on crypto during the Biden administration, and largely felt, for lack of a better word, gaslit… like, the SEC threw down and the FDIC tried really hard to keep crypto out of the banking system, but by and large the rest of the administration was trying to play footsie with crypto. So many of these bureaucrats were so afraid of being seen as stupid in tech that they would believe the most outlandish things, and not ask even basic questions about it, for fear of looking stupid. The Mark Andreessens of the world want to say that “oh, the Biden administration was out to get us,” and that is not true. They were trying to be their friend! The White House had calls with Sam Bankman-Fried on them!

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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, like, the hedge funds and the private equity funds that are financing this, it’s the same people as the 2008 financial crisis!

I just have alarm bells going off in my head. I feel like this is an issue where the public gets it, and our leaders and Congress don’t.

There’s no public benefit to having a data center in your backyard, right? Like, in the worst of the financial crisis people got suckered in because they thought that they would make money off of it, but nobody sees a data center moving in and thinks like, oh, great, I’m going to get a better rate on a vacation home. 

Yeah, and it’s very bipartisan. I mean, like, so 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 like 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. 

When I was on Wall Street, and the bailout happened, I asked my boss, “How will the public ever forgive us for the bailout?” He was like “Well, here’s the thing, in the savings and loan crisis, everyone freaked out, and yeah, they closed a regulatory agency, but then everyone forgot, and everything went back to normal — and that’s what’s going to happen this time.”

I was disgusted by that.

What are you hearing on the campaign trail? 

They hate data centers. When people find out that one of my platforms is banning data centers federally, they’re thrilled.

There’s five counties in Maryland’s 6th district. April McClain Delaney is the incumbent. She won the Democratic primary in 2024 with about 24,000 votes across five counties. Frederick County had a citizen-led ballot referendum to roll back the local elected approval of a data center, and 22,000 people in a single county signed the petition. The same amount of people who voted for the current incumbent in the last primary, across the whole district, signed a petition opposing data centers in one county.

There’s another emergency in the district, which is a DHS warehouse that was purchased in Washington County. I’m a little bit unique in my data center position. Everyone is opposed to the DHS warehouse, but I’m like, well how do you think they put people in the detention center, they use the surveillance dragnet. These things are connected. 

Playing a little bit of devil’s advocate here, what role do you see the tech industry playing in our society? 

Let me just clarify: I don’t mean data centers full of server racks. I mean specifically, AI data centers that are full of nothing but these graphics cards. 

This comes from my time at the CFPB. The powerful people need to obey the laws that already exist. That was the whole crypto situation. I believe crypto is a security. I believe it should have had to follow all of the securities laws that the SEC enforces.

It’s similar with Big Tech. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act already says that you can’t discriminate based on protected characteristics, and we know that a lot of these algorithms — Facebook, or you name it — are doing that, and it’s already illegal. So why don’t we just enforce the laws we already have against these entities?

I really don’t think that we need to reinvent the wheel. I think the playbook that we’ve seen from tech over and over again is we’re different, we’re special. I think we can do a lot if we just start to have leaders that reject this very arrogant argument that tech keeps making over and over again.

What do you think a normal, everyday person can do about data centers in their community?

My knowledge is mostly based in Maryland, but I definitely have friends that are organizing across the country. People are going to hearings and making their displeasure known. People are organizing ballot referendums, like they did in Frederick County. People are writing letters to the editor. People are doing it across the country.

The only other thing that I think would help that I don’t currently see is like, OK, this is the exact amount of money you want to give for the data center. This is what we want to do with that X billion dollars instead.

What would you want for your district with the money that’s currently going towards data centers?

I want more funding for our schools, which are very overcrowded. I want more funding for libraries, which I believe have become these beautiful centers of resistance and gathering. They’re one of the last places we can be together without spending any money. There’s immigration clinics at the library in Maryland. You can get free Narcan at the library in Frederick County and in Washington County. Rec centers are something I hear a lot from folks, because a lot of people work two jobs and it would be really nice if kids had somewhere other than the library or in addition to the library to go.

It’s really important that we are spending our money on things that are making our lives better, as opposed to spending our money on tax breaks for Big Tech building data centers that only enrich them, or waging war in Iran. 

I think people are really just sort of fed up. Why does it have to be so hard here?

Have you heard from anyone else who’s currently in Congress right now?

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