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DB Dave Blundin Dave Blundin Venture investor and serial entrepreneur, managing partner at Link Ventures and chairman of Cogo Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“I never in my life have seen a technical topic like AI be a dominant topic in the elections… By and large, industrial America and technological America operates over here, the government operates over there. The government largely does nothing, and therefore industrial America thrives. Here you're seeing the biggest intersection I've ever seen of a technology that wants to grow and an election cycle that's directly commenting: 'I'm going to stop you. I'm going to have a moratorium.' Never seen anything like that before in my entire life.”

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“I never in my life have seen a technical topic like AI be a dominant topic in the elections… By and large, industrial America and technological America operates over here, the government operates over there. The government largely does nothing, and therefore industrial America thrives. Here you're seeing the biggest intersection I've ever seen of a technology that wants to grow and an election cycle that's directly commenting: 'I'm going to stop you. I'm going to have a moratorium.' Never seen anything like that before in my entire life.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Context

Asked whether Americans are rejecting AI or just refusing to subsidize big tech's data center build-out after the midterms, Dave said the election result itself was normal, but AI being a central issue was unprecedented.

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Transcript

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 17:46 into the episode
Salim Ismail

…so than even chips or capital. So here's the question: Are Americans rejecting AI or just refusing to subsidize big techs infrastructure buildup? And could restricting AI data centers create, like accidentally, create a huge competitive mode for the incumbents. Alex, where do you start on this?

Alexander Wissner-Gross

…under your mattress. I would say just do the obvious thing. Use superintelligence, solve the top 5,000 diseases, market the heck out of it to the general public, and suddenly the general public, to the extent they aren't already in love with superintelligence, will find a way to be in love with it.

Dave Blundin

Well, you covered a lot of things back there, Alex. But if I parse them one at a time, the election rebound, midterm election rebound is totally normal. There's nothing super unusual historical about the election outcome. But I never in my life have seen a technical topic like AI be a dominant topic in the elections. Like maybe stem cells was a factor in some elections in the past. But by and large, industrial America and technological America operates over here. The government operates over there. The government largely does nothing, and therefore industrial America thrives. Here, you're seeing, I think, the biggest intersection I've ever seen in my life of a technology that wants to grow and a government…

Salim Ismail

I think we're seeing the states kind of dominate on this compared to the federal government, which is one big, huge step. When I've looked at the numbers, it seems pretty clear that, you know, if just AI and data centers was on the ticket, 56% and you would have had a negative outcome to some…

Dave Blundin

is. I mean, it's the easy way to be a populist right now is to say, I think you're using all the water. Stop, which is just outright inaccurate stuff, but it wins votes like crazy. But what's weird to me is, you know, historically, the Metas and the Googles have been very big Democrat supporters…

Salim Ismail

messaging out there, right?

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

More from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

“Cam outside here had half a billion tokens on Friday, which is about the equivalent of, I swagged at it, about 5,000 workers working for him on that day, and it cost about $5,000, so about a buck per worker per day. If those were actual human beings here in the office, they would have eaten more potato chips than that alone.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis “Even prior to the election, the big buyers, so Google, Anthropic, xAI, have reserved basically all the compute in the country for years and all the chips reserved for years. If you want a thriving entrepreneurial America, you have to have some kind of a right to compute. And the government hasn't even begun to tackle that yet. You can't innovate if you don't have access to compute, and the compute is completely sold out to five or seven big companies. That's not a really comfortable America. It's almost like the Rockefeller era again.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis