Who Is The Single Biggest Data Center Investor In Congress?

Our conversations always live on the intersection of money and politics.

That's your bread and butter.

That's what you report on.

So I'm curious, what does this story, through the collage and perspective of all of your reporting, what does it tell you? You found out you uncovered lawmakers investing millions of dollars in this data center boom.

What is this telling you?

I think there are two big lessons I drew from this reporting.

The first thing is there's just a lot of potential in using AI, again, somewhat ironically here, to sift through all of the vast amount of data on these disclosures.

This is a little bit inside baseball, but I could not have done this reporting just by reading all the disclosures one by one by myself.

was made possible because of some automated filtering and automated transcribing of these disclosures.

Some of these disclosures are handwritten.

Some of these disclosures are very dense and scanned and they're hard to parse.

And so being able to sort of trade off, the AI is much better at reading just straight text.

It can read it much faster than I can.

I'm much better at reading handwriting.

between the two were able to work together a little bit and get this reporting done.

Then the second thing I've really pulled, this whole reporting process underscored for me how big the AI data center build out really is.

So many companies are impacted by it that you wouldn't even remotely expect, at least by your first thought.

If you take Caterpillar, they make construction equipment.

You're like, okay, yeah, they probably are, you know, they're probably doing all right.

You know, you're building data centers.

You need construction equipment to do that.

Caterpillar is up 300% their shares in five years.

That's crazy.

And they don't make chips.

They don't make software or anything like that.