Everyone Says Datacenter Moratoriums Are Killing the US Buildout. We disagree

SemiAnalysis published a rebuttal to the widely repeated claim that state and local datacenter moratoriums are choking off the US AI buildout. The piece follows the same outlet's earlier debunking of two related narratives, that datacenters are draining local water supplies and that a wave of cancelled capacity signals a slowdown, and applies the same treatment to moratoriums: checking the actual project pipeline against the headline claim rather than repeating it. The argument is not that no moratoriums exist, but that their scale is too small relative to the pipeline of planned and under-construction capacity to explain any slowdown in the buildout. That distinction matters for anyone tracking AI infrastructure capacity as a leading indicator of model training and inference supply, since a narrative of regulatory-driven scarcity implies a different capacity trajectory than one where growth continues roughly on schedule. Readers relying on the moratorium narrative to forecast compute availability should weigh this against SemiAnalysis's underlying data before adjusting those forecasts.