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DS David Sacks Founder who backs founders through @craft_ventures.

“Think about this. In this last election, you had both Democrats and Republicans running campaign attack ads on any politician who approved any data center. So if you're a politician or a civil servant who wants to move up the ladder, what is your incentive to stamp approval on anything? I don't see anyone who is ambitious politically wanting to stick their neck out in any way to approve anything over the next four years.”

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Money & Markets · November 2026

“Think about this. In this last election, you had both Democrats and Republicans running campaign attack ads on any politician who approved any data center. So if you're a politician or a civil servant who wants to move up the ladder, what is your incentive to stamp approval on anything? I don't see anyone who is ambitious politically wanting to stick their neck out in any way to approve anything over the next four years.” — David Sacks, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Context

Sacks was pushing back on optimism that newly elected officials will be reasonable about data centers. His base case is that already-permitted projects get finished but new ones stall, because no official has a reason to approve them.

Transcript

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg Around 1:11:44 into the episode
David Sacks

are the issues

Jason Calacanis

she's talking about?

David Sacks

I'll explain it. But look, I saw an analyst from Semi-Analysis then come out and say that you do realize that projects that are under construction right now don't necessarily have every single permit they need to actually open for business. In other words, once you've constructed the data center, you may still have to get an air pollution permit. There's various kinds of permits that sometimes you don't get till the end. So if you take what she's saying seriously and literally that there'll be no new permits passed until this new regulatory regime comes into effect, we could end up with a bunch of stranded, half-finished projects. Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily going to happen. I'm not criticizing her because I don't know what she's going to do. She hasn't even taken office yet. I'm simply pointing out that this could go a lot of ways. You know, they could do this in a reasonable way or an unreasonable way. So you could end up with a lot of half-finished projects. My base case is that the projects that are fully permitted will get done in 2027. But I don't think there's going to be major new projects in this new regime for a long time for the simple reason that there's no political incentive for…

Jason Calacanis

have set the table. They have such an amazing footprint right now. They're already in the poll position. Tanking the economy, I think, opens up an attack vector for them. I think they're much better off to saying, here's what we want and extract value from them. Just extract value. We want free…

David Sacks

Yeah.

Jason Calacanis

And if they don't, if the data centers and these governors whose job it is to fight for their people and get the best deals, just like it's the company's job to get the best location, the best deal for their shareholders, if they can't come to an arrangement, again, these things can be put in…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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