“The data center build out and the absolute scale that was required to make any of these numbers make sense almost certainly will not happen… Ben Thompson said that before, the constraints were first compute and then physical capacity, but now political capacity is the major constraint.”
Big Technology · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Alex had said nobody seems to understand what the market is doing. Ranjan disagreed: after the election results and local data center bans, the build-out the valuations assume cannot go ahead as planned. The Ben Thompson line is Ranjan relaying Thompson's point.
Transcript
…people being vehemently against AI and data centers was probably the least for me. I mean, we've seen the numbers. I forget what I know it was pulling worse than ICE. I hope it was not pulling worse than ISIS. I think maybe they might have been on that same poll six months ago, but not looking good
for any of the three.
No, no, no, no. Jesus. We all know, I mean, we've heard this, we've seen it. It's been, you know, very clear that the public is, especially the data center debate, and the AI industry has done itself no favors in terms of how it's positioned itself. I think the really interesting part, and we're certainly seeing that in the markets, is what does that actually mean very concretely for the Anthropic IPO, for the hyperscalers? Like, this is going to add a lot more unpredictability around what their actual economics look like over the next two to three quarters. And I think that is exactly what triggered the market. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of that volatility.
Well, you know what's interesting? It's been very difficult to sort of put your finger on what's happening. So when the election results were coming in Tuesday and Wednesday, Wednesday, actually, in the wake of it, the tech stocks went up and the market went up. Some people said it was because…
I'll disagree there. I actually think it's pretty clear what's happening. I know NASDAQ's like up, what is it, 1.6% as we record after being down over 6% and the biggest fall since COVID, like March 2020. So, I mean, we're always going to get this little bit of a bounce back, but I mean, it's set…
All right, I'm going to challenge you on that because, you know, I'm trying to figure out how real the restrictions are going to be. And I keep thinking back to the initial tech lash where Congress went after tech and the FTC went after tech and the DOJ went after tech. And you even saw meaningful…
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