Lauren Goode: Yes, they all have the desire to grow more. Who among us, Mike? But hyperscalers refer to this category of large tech companies or cloud service providers. So meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, they’re all in that category.
Molly Taft: Yes, and I think it’s important to remember that these companies have as much capital and the ability to raise capital as human businesses. So they’re able to do some really crazy things to build fast and build-out really, really big. And they get great art, because their goals now are to build these things new and make them run so they can interact with this physical infrastructure to compete with each other.
Lauren Goode: I think so, molly. I think there’s a lot of frenemy building going on right now, and I love being a part of their group chats when all these announcements are made.
Michael Calore: Yes, and speaking of Frenemies, another source of influence that works for these companies in the political arena. Obviously, in order to build a large data center in a certain area, you need to have the political will to do it, which means you need buy-in – from the local residents, the local government, the State, the country. So what’s going on in the political arena with the people who want to build more data centers and the people who are against it, the regulation? How does that play?
Molly Taft: That’s a good question, and I think if you look at the national conversation, it’s very different than what’s happening at the local level. You have Washington, you obviously have an administration that is very kind to the idea of the American Empire. Importantly in the energy debate, the way the Trump administration has approached this support has been the support of fossil fuels. They prefer all data centers to be powered by oil and gas, less nuclear and coal. And this works well for those industries. If you’re going to have this big day of energy demand, it’s really cool to be in the middle of that and be the one everyone wants to turn to for energy resources. And on the other hand, there has been this concentration of local opposition to these data centers for various reasons, be it trends in electricity, be it real big threads, and some real big struggles have been put to this issue in the national debate. I think of xai in Memphis. When Elon Musk wanted to get xai up and running, he installed a bunch of groundless gas turbines to install Xai in a black community that already has serious problems with air pollution and asthma. And those people value themselves. Earlier this year, there was an effort in DC to force a moratorium on any federal regulation surrounding AI at all. It was a very broad inclusion in the Good House Bill that ultimately failed. But one of the people who publicly opposed it was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who talked about data centers in opposition, and compared Ai to Skynet, the fictional AI from the Terminator movie franchise. So, this is finding some unusual bed holes in the league for each other, I think that this kind of contradiction between the management that there is a rotation forward, and once the energy companies will be made to benefit from this that will make the effects of what things will do in their communities.
