Jason Calacanis Angel investor, internet entrepreneur and podcaster focused on startups and venture capital.

“If the governors decide they want to put the screws tight on big tech hyperscalers and neoclouds, they will need to understand that these data centers could be put in Canada, in Mexico, in Singapore, in Malaysia. … We're going to be a net importer of tokens.”

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

Context

Calacanis asked what happens if US states slow data center construction. His answer is that the compute and the jobs simply move abroad, since the data travels fast enough that it doesn't need to be in the US.

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Transcript

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg Around 49:46 into the episode

Jason Calacanis

Can you just say who the hyperscalers are just so people understand the difference between them? Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya

…destruction and bankruptcy for me, because I'm just out of the game. And so what do they do? They will take the last gasp and do whatever they have. So I think all the game theory, Jason, literally comes down to this one deal and whether Elon decides to rip it. Because if he rips it, watch out.

Jason Calacanis

…that these data centers could be put in Canada, in Mexico, in Singapore, in Malaysia, and many other locations. The Middle East is a little bit off the table because of the war. War ends. You start putting these data centers in the Middle East. Then the job of doing the next large model will not occur, Freeberg, on U.S. soil. It might occur in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Malaysia, Singapore. We're going to be a net importer of tokens. And this will be the biggest cell phone ever because all those $300,000, $400,000 jobs building these data centers are going to go away. All of that tax will be collected locally in Malaysia, where Google is putting a huge data center. And the data can make it around the world quite quickly. It doesn't need to be in the United States, which these governors are going to learn a very hard lesson…

David Friedberg

Well, they might ban the use of AI too. Okay, well, now we're going

Jason Calacanis

to be able to do that. That's being

David Friedberg

floated. I mean, that's the conversation right now.

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

More from All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

“Beyond a certain point, if a bunch of data centers get slowed down, a bunch of constraint happens, there's going to be a lot less capacity than people think. The dollar cost per megawatt per month is going to go through the roof. The dollar cost of a GPU hour is going to go through the roof. And the people that will be willing to pay the premium are going to be the ginormous companies with huge balance sheets.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

“I think the data centers end up being treated like utilities in the future. The government says we want to regulate compute. They're not going to regulate the chips or the models because those are too hard to catch up on. And you're never going to be able to regulate development of software. But the utilization of that software is fundamentally constrained by how much access you get to compute.” — David Friedberg, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg