Asked what voters worry about most with data centers, Bores lists local concerns like water and energy bills, then cites polling that the AI label alone makes them markedly less popular.
…to pass federally. So, the fact that there were people running who were made clear that they were going to stand up to entrenched interests, that they were going to try to empower the American people, was a resounding message. And whether that was on data centers or broadly on regulation on AI.
What do you think voters? Voters are most concerned about when it comes to the data centers. I feel like there's a whole swath of things that people have expressed. But I mean, what ranks highest, do you think?
It's tough to separate out the different pieces of it, but there's a debate about whether it is AI itself or just the data center. There's lots of things that are just local concerns with the data center. People express a lot of concern about water usage. So in the U.S., that's pretty highly regulated, and we've seen much better behavior than what we've seen in other countries. But the energy prices that might spike because of it, even when a data center is promising to bring its own energy, if it puts a lot more demand on the components that generate energy, that could raise prices for your local utility that's doing it as well. So whether people will truly get their bills frozen or reduced because of a data center has become a big issue. But there was really interesting polling that showed if you asked people how they felt about a data center versus how they felt about an AI data center, data centers by themselves were still underwater, but an AI data center was another 20 points underwater. Just that it was tied to AI made a big difference. And so you saw OpenAI saying that they are going to try to rebrand data centers as AI compute campuses. I mean, campus sounds fun, but they're still tying the AI into it in a way that I think won't alleviate the very real…
You have proposed more stringent regulation on AI and data centers. You had co-sponsored a bill in New York that would have paused data centers, data center construction for a year. It ended up happening by a different measure that Governor Hochul later implemented. But when I hear that, this idea…
Well, I think it was Camus who said humans aren't rational. They're rationalizing. So the philosophy of the mind and of the voters we can put off there. But there is a, you know, if a data center, I like to point out there are plenty of data centers that exist in my hometown of New York City.…
it's a great point. Just looking at the market's reaction. So it seems as though investors basically believe that this blue wave, this blue tsunami, essentially means that we're going to have very stringent regulation on data centers, or at least data center construction is going to be…
