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If you want to slow the progress of a system, or kill it entirely, we have to think about single points of failure. Silicon production (at least the kind capable of powering modern chips), for instance, is completely reliant on ultrapure quartz from North Carolina. That is a hardware chokepoint that can halt all compute progress.
Likewise, maybe we can turn the energy grid into a single point of failure. Obviously we want to retain energy for human purposes, but if we need to halt development we could unify all AI infrastructure on one tied grid. We could have data center energy run on singular dedicated lines on existing transmission line infrastructure. Separating the grid would probably be politically popular. The grid is predicted to have 2 trillion invested into it by 2030, largely for data center use.