Bloomberg播客：AI数据中心面临土地与监管瓶颈

This is a free idea to anyone in Hollywood, but I really think someone needs to come up with a TV series where it's like a giant data center being built in a really small town, and the dynamic between, like the influx of all the contractors. Oh yeah, I want to have some interesting story lines. Sorry. Oh, yeah. I mean, just not exactly what you're talking about, but my friends and I who went on the trip, we all watched Eddington before we went over to look at him, and I didn't know what kind of movie it was.

I just knew was like kind of about a data center. And I was just like, you know, shooting each other up. And I'm like, oh God, is this what you to see? Yeah. I was thinking something a little bit more lighthearted, but, you know, you never know what direction it could go in. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, there are a lot of interesting angles when it comes to AI.

Yeah, you think so? Yeah, just to put it mildly. But one of the most interesting things, I think, is that we think about it as this, like ephemeral digital technology. Yeah. You know, in some sense, it's like the sass of yore. That's right. There's a window that you open on your browser and type stuff into the internet, and the internet spits stuff out at you. Hopefully not literally. But there is also this very physical component to AI because it involves huge amounts of power, huge amounts of things like memory chips, and of course, put those two things together, huge numbers of data centers.

Now this is being like what is sort of fundamentally different about this, at least from a market perspective. Yeah, right. Which is that when we had the sass boom of the prior decade, etc., like by and large, the successful companies, were not they didn't need to go into debt to build their garage or whatever. They were like building data centers and but like, they were not so computationally, they were not so massive that it was like they had to borrow money.

They funded them from free cash flow quite easily. The companies building on top of that, they just plug into there. There was always availability on an Amazon cloud or it's not like some compute scarcity. You're not like using slack. One day and then it's like, oh, your four hour window is up. It will reset in a few hours. Like, yes, we are there. Physical constraints. Did the air build out, which basically in the history of the internet is totally novel, right.

And I think that's really emerging as in many ways the prime constraint because yeah, it feels like investors still are very happy to more or less fling money at the hyperscalers, at data center projects, at all of those things. There's no capital shortage, right? There's no capital shortage. What there is is a shortage of, again, power, land, regulatory and political approvals for actually building these things. Totally.

And, you know, this is like such a big country that it's like I always think like, yeah, data centers are great. I just like put them out in the middle of nowhere. And then I'm like, oh, that's literally NIMBYism, right? It's like, that's literally what everybody like, everybody has that thought, oh, there must just be somewhere out in the middle of nowhere to put it. But hey, it's going to be, in theory, near somewhere.

And if we could just solve all of our issues by putting everything in the middle of nowhere, there wouldn't be an issue. There are reasons why they're located where they are. They have to be ideally an axis near some sort of power infrastructure, some water infrastructure. These are things that also attract people. It's not hard to imagine that the middle of nowhere might not have a lot of energy. And water. Yeah, right.

Exactly. Otherwise there would be a bunch of people there, right? The other interesting thing about data centers and AI is that it's become one of the very few bipartisan issues, I think, in America. And you have people both on the left and the right now who are saying that they don't like data centers, they don't want the data centers in their backyard. We interviewed Kathy Hochul, the governor, about her moratorium on building new data centers.

So there seems to be a lot of, let's say, feelings when it comes to data centers. And, you know, it did not get as much attention as Kathy Hochul, I imagine, because she's a Democrat. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott, just in the last few days, also announcing, curbs on the state. People were a little quieter about that one. That has some reasons why maybe it didn't map to people's view of Texas is a state that's just open for business in a way that big blue states aren't.

But it's a as you say, it's bipartisan. And then I'd say like one other thing that I think is interesting about it is like AI in general. So we know the data center controversy, but I in general is sort of like riven with anxiety on multiple levels. Obviously, for years people have been talking about, you know, mass job laws. Lately we've been talking on the podcast about, you know, what people called like X risk and stuff like that, like truly rogue AI.

And in my mind, I feel like, the people inside the labs are very anxious about those other two, these sort of like effects on society. And, you know, again, literal like safety issues. What are they going to be responsible if everyone loses a job, etc.? But on the ground, it does not feel like those things are the thing are the fears, even though I'm, you know, anxious like, that are really like driving the polit, the backlash politics.

If I could sum it all up, it feels very much like data centers are the physical manifestation of a new technology that is in some ways very hard to sell to America. Right? Like, here's this thing that is not only going to take your job, but like, maybe it'll kill you too. Well, I was going to say you don't like data centers because you're worried about the noise complaints. I don't like data centers because I'm worried they're going to kill me.

We are not the same. We are not the same. All right. Well, that is the perfect way to put it. And we have the perfect guest to try to talk through all of these, various things. We're going to be speaking once again with Jasmine Sun. She is an independent writer covering AI and Silicon Valley culture, and she just published an amazing piece of reporting called No Data Centers in My Backyard on her Substack. So, Jasmine, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

I’m so excited to be here again. So congrats on the piece. We were saying earlier, it it kind of sounds fun just to hop in a car with a few friends and research assistants and go on a road trip through middle America looking at data center sites. Yeah, I mean, it was fun. I was trying to decide where in the country I wanted to go to do this data center road trip. I remember this was the last question I asked Claude Fable before he was taken away from me for several days.

Oh yeah. And so it was either going to be Michigan, Wisconsin, which is where I ended up going, or it was going to be Texas, or maybe the southeast, like Memphis, etc.. And to be entirely honest, part of the reason I ended up doing Michigan, Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest is because it sounded a lot more pleasant to spend July by Great Lakes than it did driving across the Texas desert. I'm sorry, Greg Abbott no, I think that's a totally good reason.

The Midwest, the Upper Midwest is absolutely lovely this time of year. It's beautiful and there's lakes and all of that stuff. When we think about data center activity, I do tend to think more, I guess still in my head. But Northern Virginia, there can't be that much space left out there. I do think a fair amount about Texas, in part because of sort of like the Elon versus, etc., and how much tech activity is happening there.

I probably do think a little bit about the southeast. How active, though, is that area, like how much inter