Alex Kantrowitz
Independent journalist covering the technology industry and its effect on society, with a focus on large tech companies and artificial intelligence.
“AI is a technology with potential and a great story, but that story is not commensurate to its current earnings. You have trillions of dollars in public company valuations traded on the expectations of effectively two companies with $100 billion in combined revenue… It's never going to be a normal trade until it starts to settle out, and it hasn't settled out yet. So any hiccup and everything goes haywire… Data centers in particular are the linchpin here. Once they go, the story evaporates.”
Big Technology · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Alex was explaining why the AI trade swung wildly in the week after the midterms, when voters and local governments went against data centers. His theory: a handful of fast-growing labs carry an enormous amount of public-market value.
Transcript
…Usually maybe there's maybe a fall and then a bounce back the next day. But the fact that it was up, down, up, and no one seems to have a handle on where this is going is an interesting feature of this trade. And that has trickle-down effects across everything that we watch. What do you think?
…political capacity is the major constraint. And I think we're going to see that going forward. So I think there is no way the assumed build out of data centers and compute capacity can continue as at least it was forecasted to. So then it just becomes, how does that change each individual story?
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 wins from the regulatory agencies and cases they took against these companies. And where are we? Has anything changed as a result of this? I would say very little. And when I, so that, so, so I am always tempted to double check my in my initial reaction on the headline to what's actually going to happen five years down the road. And you know what? Like you're already starting to see some of the stuff come in here that's leading you to believe that maybe this is also another blip and that the votes and the legislators and the governors won't get in the way of the AI build out the way that we might have anticipated. Here's two things that I want to bring up. Number one, there have been lots of 38 jurisdictions or more that have voted for restrictions or bans on data centers, right? We agree with that. But that does not limit these tech companies from either A, expanding where they already are, because the groundwork is already in place, or B, finding new areas that would be maybe…
I'll agree that I think it is the beginning of a negotiation. It's going to be an ongoing negotiation. But again, I think like I keep thinking about this not in terms of, you know, is it going to happen or is it not going to happen? All that matters to me, and I think all that matters to the…
Yeah. And it does go back to some of the developments or some of the volatility, I would say, that you've seen from these companies and basically from the whole trade. And to me, I think, you know, part of this, and just to go back to my comment about the volatility here, is that so much of this is…
is exactly my argument. I appreciate this. You just laid it out even more eloquently and in a structured way than I did. I mean, this is it. It's exactly the narrow set of companies that the entire trade is built around. And anything, again, we've talked about this even on Anthropic specifically.…
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