Data center

What's something that's really just surprised you so far this year?

I would say that what has surprised me is the degree to which the data center backlash gained a foothold as quickly as it did.

I think it was sort of predictable that we were going to see some community opposition.

And, you know, I had inklings of it getting pretty serious a while ago, but it really... rose to prominence very quickly.

But nonetheless, it is one of the main reasons.

And obviously that you'd expect to come more out of progressives.

And indeed, like – I think the most, I guess you use the word extreme version of the anti-data center sentiment is coming from people like Bernie Sanders, who's saying, as we're recording this, there's this big hubbub over Dario Amadei from Anthropic wrote this piece saying we need to pace the development of AI, and Sam Altman agreed, and Elon Musk agreed, and everything.

And Bernie came out and said, pacing's not enough.

that caitlyn's got a lot of bylines

Yeah, she had four stories from last week that were all about the data center debate in Salix.

So yeah, let's do the greatest hits here.

The biggest one was we received some documents from some folks.

We love getting documents.

So if anybody listening works at any level of government or any other kind of organization who wants to send the Sioux City Journal some documents, pass those puppies right on along.

And basically the documents we got in this case showed that the city was talking to MidAmerican in January about interest in the property that could be developed into a data center, which was several months before any annexation request came in for the property and sort of was in contention with what they've been saying in the public, which is that they weren't certain what the property might be used for.

And so obviously that caused a bit of a stir among the anti data center folks that the city had been a little misleading in their eyes.

Zoe Reed from our friends at WHYY reports hundreds of communities across the U.S. have implemented freezes on data centers which power the growth of AI.

The protesters want city leaders to stop any future AI data center proposals until they enact strict local regulations.

Data centers generate millions of dollars in local tax revenue, but there's growing concern about their strain on the electric grid and rising energy bills.

Residents living near the facilities have complained about impacts on air and water quality and increased noise.

South Philly resident Campbell Simmons worries about what the data centres do, including allowing for increased surveillance.

A moratorium would just at least give us a chance to understand the impact of a data centre and give us a chance to get to the table, give us a chance to share the research and share the data.

This is just trying to give us a chance to have any kind of say as a community.

City officials say just two sites in Philadelphia have the potential to support AI data centers, but there are no current proposals to build on them.

The other reason that this is

important is that we know that the organized right is trying to step into the anti-data center fight because so many of these fights are in rural middle America and places that have been shot on for decades and places that have been, you know, repeatedly betrayed by the Democratic Party.

And so there have been in the Midwest, we know that Klan groups and white supremacists have been trying to kind of take the lead on anti-data center fights.

Quite recently, it came out that

one

You've been busy.

And I want to cover data centers.

I want to cover driver's licenses.

And I want to cover college athletes.

Let's start with data centers.

I love them, but a lot of people don't.

You're trying to hit the perfect spot.

What is it?

week's developments.

We'll also talk about data centers moving into next year.

We have Brad Gerstner, who is the CEO of a hedge fund.

He was giving his prediction on new data center capacity at the all in conference down here in Southern California.

We'll talk about some of the hurdles politically and just from a supply chain perspective as it relates to that.

Then we'll get into the consumer.

We'll shift gears away from AI and data centers into the consumer because it was actually interesting this week that you had some executives from Walmart, Dollar Tree, and you also had the executives from the major financial institutions as well.

Give some insight into the consumer, and we're seeing this split, if you will, from what the lenders and the credit card providers are saying versus what you're seeing over where the consumer actually lives at these stores.

AI.

Let's put data centers aside and just talk about AI.

It seems to me like data centers was the entry level gateway drug to trying to make people afraid of AI and it wasn't sticking the way they needed it to.

Yeah.

And that's kind of what I'm saying about China is that they're kind of going after the infrastructure build.

And then this full sort of panic we're getting now over the last couple of days, like you say, the Democrats are very good at fear mongering.

They've certainly stirred up a lot of fear about this.

But look, as I've been saying, if you don't like data centers, then you can say goodbye to things like your iPhone.

And the locations of those data centers, they try to keep them under wraps.

But at this point, I think every Amazon data center is probably, the location of it is probably known.

Could you imagine just the impact of strategically targeting just those data centers in a future conflict and the impact to, you know, obviously that nation's economy, but then, you know, the world economy and so forth in this case, the U.S. were attacked that way.

I think it's pretty scary stuff.

And what happened in UAE and Bahrain are examples of that.