Voters Revolt Against Big Tech: Who Controls The AI Power Grid?

Michael, thanks so much for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm happy to be here.

I want to start with public sentiment because there's polling out there that shows that public opinion on data centers has really soured and we've seen politicians from both parties turn against them.

So if the midterms end up becoming a referendum on AI infrastructure, how would you see this impacting building timelines?

The important thing to know about midterms and any political impact from a change in Congress is that in order to pass anything really meaningful that would impact the data center build out, the bills that Congress passes are are ultimately going to need the president's signature.

And so you might have some Democrats who hold hearings.

You might have some Republicans who even align with Democrats.

And I think in a really unlikely scenario, you can imagine Congress actually passing a bill.

But even if that happened, it would need the president's signature to become law.

And so until President Trump sours on data centers, which we've seen no indication that he will, I think it's unlikely that we see any impact from any congressional bills.

That's not to say that there won't be impact in the discourse or that it doesn't have downstream implications, but I think it's unlikely that there's a law that would really prevent or slow the build out of data centers at the congressional level.

So do you see the real power line with these local and state level agencies then? It just seems that we've seen a lot of state and national candidates put data centers at the center of their campaign advertising.

So would you characterize this mostly as political theater?

Well, I think it's not theater in the sense that it does have a really meaningful impact on what's built and how these projects are built.

So I think that at those levels, you know, governors passing bills like a pause in New York or what we've seen from Governor Abbott and Texas, where they're kind of restudying some of these data centers connecting to the ERCOT grid.

All of that will impact development.

And then, of course, we see these local moratoria that can outright ban data centers or block all construction.

That's really meaningful and it does have a big impact on projects and capital.

And are there any specific races that are on your radar that you think would be a good indicator that this opposition is really becoming an industry killing threat?

Yeah, I think the most important race to be watching is the Texas governor's race and Senate race there, because Texas is the largest market in terms of planned data center capacity.

And so what happens in Texas will have an impact on 20 to 25 percent of the market.

The other thing that's important about Texas is that it's sort of a symbolic city.

state in a way.

It's sort of the most extreme pro-growth, pro-data center state in many ways.