# Political Shifts Disrupt AI Data Center Expansion

**Podcast:** Better Offline
**Published:** 2026-11-06

## Transcript

This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?
This is a constant worry.
And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why.
I'm Walter Isaacson.
On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future.
Listen to The Builders starting October 13th on the iHeart Radio app.
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In October 2021, my brother David was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him.
This podcast...
My biggest fear is that I am afraid of being forgotten.
My brother David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life.
It's weird and messy and vulnerable, and I'm gonna share all of it with you.
Okay, so here we go.
Listen to My Brother David on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself.
Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts.
So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts.
If you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you.
Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers.
which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way.
These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in life-saving scientific research, until they were told they no longer belonged.
And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us?
Get Blockers now only at blockers.fm.
Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue.
I'm your host, Ed Zitron.
And I'm back, folks.
Sorry about missing you last week.
It's been a rough one, but you know what?
Things are changing for the better.
And I've generally avoided politics, and the few times I have actually talked about it, I've received quite a few pissy emails, but Tuesday night was a wonderful, abundant font of hope in what has been a pretty grim two years.
Those of you who've listened to the show for that period might remember my Rock Society episode at the time and how fucking angry I sounded because I watched as the most evil people took over our society as a direct result of hapless Democrat leadership and a media ecosystem that gaslit people about high prices and disregarded their very material problems as an anomaly in data that said that actually everything was fine.
And on top of it, the tech industry had reached its ugliest, most abusive heights.
And within hours of Trump's election, we saw every one of these worthless scumbags, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Sachin Adela, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and more, kneel down and pucker up for two years of lip service for fascists.
Within a few months, Mark Zuckerberg was decrying that he wanted more masculine energy at large companies, as he did the least masculine thing of all time, desperately kissing up to the biggest bully he could find, a triangular dementia patient that looks like Pete's the Hutt that had won an election based on a disenfranchised electorate.
In reality, Mark Zuckerberg is a huge pussy that's mad that anybody would ever hold him accountable.
All of us...
have felt landlocked in a suffocating era defined by an oafish, half-hearted fascism that lashes out in random directions, creating a sensation that nothing good can ever happen again, because cynical malcontents have turned everything into a casino or a strip-mining operation.
And we've watched as the political and social infrastructure has caved to their every demand, how the media has enabled them, how the existing systems have empowered them.
It's felt for most of my life that we'd never escape the weight of the eras of Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, and of course George Bush, the Bushes fucking hell, every time people have been sold further entrenchment in systemic thinking.
And Tuesday night felt like the beginning of the end of that era.
A repudiation of the right wing, the hate, the anger, and of those who would dismiss others based on their race or gender or class, and of the pedophile protectors that refused to reveal the entirety of the depravity of Jeffrey Epstein for fear that it might implicate their faves.
And let's just be clear here, if you're on the Epstein list, you're nobody's fave other than, well, somebody else on there too.
And I just don't give a shit anymore.
I want to see these people humiliated.
I want to see...
Those who did the touchdown dance on November 5th, 2024, are embarrassed and scared that their scams and evil actions will no longer be tolerated.
We now have a trans woman, Alison Montgomery, as a representative of Alabama's 25th district.
Gina Ihanohosa is both the first Democrat governor since 1990 and the first Hispanic governor of Texas, and has made it clear she intends to bring data center developers to heel.
With Abdul El-Sayed, we have an avowed leftist and a Muslim as the senator for Michigan.
This fucking rocks.
Now, to be clear, the war isn't over with the Rae, or the establishment that continues to try and build bridges with them.
We're going to see attempts to reconcile with the racists and the Epstein defenders and the ring kissers, and it's important that we remind everybody of the names of those who kissed up to fascism, and especially those who were excited to do so the second it happened.
Everyone who excitedly talked about American dynamism or working with Trump to make America great again is on fucking notice.
No more Mr.
Nice Guy unless you're going to be nice to people, which is why I'd like to remind any anti-trans listeners to open up Bud Dwyer's Manila envelope and use what's inside immediately.
I'm not fucking around, by the way.
Trans people have been crucified for years for the crime of being alive, of choosing to be who they are, all in a way that's totally harmless outside of the imaginations of the worst scum of society, taking on great financial expense, literally making themselves a target because they want to be who they are in the most, and I must repeat, harmless way possible.
And if you take issue with me being so aggressive, to quote David Lynch, fix your hearts or die.
We must protect trans people.
The show and its listeners protect trans people.
And if you do not, I do not want you as a listener.
And quite honestly, I want you to walk into fucking traffic.
And the anger I feel is nothing compared to what trans people have dealt with over their entire lives, over the last few years especially.
I just don't have any patience or calm anymore.
I'm in a great fucking mood.
But my mood...
My good mood does not change the fact that trans people are still mistreated, that there were still anti-trans bills on the docket that went through.
And that is a goddamn shame.
And we must push the people that are obsessed with checking children's genitals, that are obsessed with chasing trans people out of society.
We must chase them out.
Those people are the ones we don't want.
Not the harmless trans people, not the people, the very small shred of society that just wants to be themselves.
Why do they not get to be themselves?
What's the problem with that?
The problem is, you're fucking strange.
Our world does not have to be white.
It does not have to be straight.
It does not have to be run by growth-obsessed, pedophile-protecting scumbags.
We can have better.
We will have better.
And we will have so much better when we're represented by people that are representative of the larger world rather than the various echo chambers farted out by the consultancy class and the establishment.
While I cannot guarantee that everything will be better overnight, we are on our way to something grander than rolling in our filth in a world born of Kissinger, Friedman and Reagan.
And Thatcher and Bush and Clinton and Obama and so on and so forth.
And I'm sure I'll hear from someone telling me off, so let me get ahead of it.
Fuck off.
I don't care.
If you aren't excited about what happened Tuesday, you're protecting a system that runs on despair and exploitation.
I, and the listeners I want to retain, advocate for a world built on inclusivity, community, and hope.
I may swear, I may get angry, I may tell anti-trans people to start their cars in the garage, but that's from a place of love and belief that things can improve.
And Tuesday night proved that things can change for the better, and that seemingly impossible movements can be kneecapped and near entirely collapse in the space of months, and has begun an industry-wide panic around the viability of the data center build-out, sending NVIDIA's stock into a bear market and numerous chipmakers and neoclouds crashing.
Per Bloomberg, Robert Pavlik of Dakota Wealth Management believes that the market is acting like the blue wave represents the end of the AI build-out, and both OpenAI and Meta, per various articles, are actively worrying that the blue wave may materially alter their construction plans.
While nothing has truly shifted yet, we are no longer in a political or social climate that rewards backing everything that the tech industry does.
Texas is now a thoroughly blue state outside of the state Senate, where Republicans still hold a thin majority and are already desperately trying to undermine the powers of the lieutenant governor before Vicky Goodwin takes over in January, which spells ill for the 57.7 gigawatts of planned IT capacity in the state, more than half of which is being built by first-time developers, per Bloomberg.
33 different ballot...
Measures to restrict data centers were passed by voters or were leading as of writing this sentence per stateline, with 21 municipalities in Ohio alone, one of the biggest and fastest growing data center build-out geographies in the world, voting to restrict them.
Per Bloomberg, the gubernatorial races from Georgia to Ohio and Pennsylvania could leave half of proposed AI data center additions across the U.S.
vulnerable to stricter local scrutiny and pushback.
We love that.
Yeah, turns out that people hate data centers and are enraged with the tech industry and they're tired of Elon Musk and don't want to feel under the thumb of billionaires.
The AI industry accidentally created the single best bipartisan talking point ever by force-feeding rural communities giant expensive monoliths explicitly built to take their jobs and now face outright opposition in effectively every state other than the Dakotas with little or no response other than, uh...
Having data centers makes America stronger?
And, well, the AI bubble is only really made possible in a climate of unrestrained capitalism.
NVIDIA's growth is entirely dependent on unimpeded data center build-outs, and without those, there's little reason to keep buying tens of billions of dollars of GPUs every quarter.
Without more capacity, Anthropic and OpenAI and other AI labs are unable to sell their stories based on infinite growth because they literally cannot grow without more capacity.
And once that narrative sets in, everything begins to implode.
Our world can be better if we stand together against the things we hate and rally to advocate for the things we love.
And the pressure against the noxious form of the tech industry is working.
And I know some of you, and I forget how many, maybe it's just a handful of you, but you are, you deserve your own shout out.
There are some of you who have been going to city council meetings, meetings with the mayor, what have you, mentioning my name, mentioning my work and getting this shit canceled.
You people are fucking heroes.
If you're listening, email.
I love you.
I want to give you a free sub to the newsletter.
Like, let me know how I can help.
You're awesome.
And I'm proud.
I'm proud of all of you because I know tons of you have been writing your state representatives.
You've been writing your mayors.
You've been writing these people and telling them to stop building the fucking data centers.
And it is working.
But the work isn't done.
The pushback isn't over.
And we will continue to keep winning.
And I will be back next week with Paul Kudrosky and Ed Elson to talk about the post-election economy and what the AI trade looks like going forward.
I love you all.
How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?
This is a constant worry.
And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why.
I'm Walter Isaacson.
On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future.
Listen to The Builders starting October 13th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In October 2021, my brother David was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him.
This podcast.
My biggest fear is that I am afraid of being forgotten.
My brother David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life.
It's weird and messy and vulnerable, and I'm gonna share all of it with you.
Okay, so here we go.
Listen to My Brother David on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself.
Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts.
So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts.
If you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you.
Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers.
which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way.
These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in life-saving scientific research until they were told they no longer belonged.
And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us?
Get Blockers now only at blockers.fm.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.