Nilay Patel
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.
“Our approach to all this at The Verge is always that we do policy, not politics. … But the products aren't good enough to sell people on the costs. You cannot tell people that you have to listen to the whine of a data center in their backyard for AI overviews and some of truly the most hilarious deepfake slops in history. It's not worth it. It just isn't worth it to anyone.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Reacting to the midterms, where data center measures lost almost everywhere, Patel gives a product-based explanation for the backlash: voters are being asked to bear real costs for AI features they don't value.
Transcript
Yeah.
…industry needed to not exist because there is so much money. This House of Cards is built on all of this happening. And it has started to feel like if it was ever going to just all collapse all at once, you could really look at what happened on Tuesday as the thing that may have started all of it.
Sure. Democrats and Republicans alike ran on opposing data centers. Democrats in particular ran on opposing big tech and constraining what the AI industry might do. You know, our approach to all this at the verge is always that we do policy, not politics. Like a deep analysis of how the voters in Heartland America feel is just, we've never been good at that thing. We're always pretty good at policy. We've always been pretty bad at politics. But if I was going to do political analysis here, I would just make the same point that we've been making about AI for a long time on this show. The products aren't good enough to sell people on the costs.…
Right.
And it's like, well, that's just, that's just bribery. Well, and that's
that's such a fun example, actually, because this was, this is big news this week. But the Google reaction to that was essentially to say, we're not taking this away from you. It's just that search and AI are now so closely tied to one another that if you don't want AI, which is your right, we…
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