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KK Kirsten Korosec Kirsten Korosec Transportation editor at TechCrunch who has covered EVs, autonomous vehicles, urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade.

“There was a lot of waving of hands about how we couldn't possibly operate under any other circumstances. And we're already seeing companies like OpenAI all of a sudden go, oh, actually, we can change our policies. They're not going to require NDAs anymore. … What this shows is that when you put up either a regulatory certainty in the marketplace or at least signals of going in that direction, then corporations will respond.”

Equity · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“There was a lot of waving of hands about how we couldn't possibly operate under any other circumstances. And we're already seeing companies like OpenAI all of a sudden go, oh, actually, we can change our policies. They're not going to require NDAs anymore. … What this shows is that when you put up either a regulatory certainty in the marketplace or at least signals of going in that direction, then corporations will respond.” — Kirsten Korosec, Equity

Context

The hosts were discussing the data center ballot measures and the secrecy around projects, including NDAs signed by local officials. Korosec points to OpenAI's new data center policies as evidence that companies change once regulation looks likely.

Transcript

Equity Around 09:22 into the episode
Sean O'Kane

…is, you know, has spoken pretty openly about this being a campaign promise and something that she wants to focus on. So, yeah, it's the thing that I think the tech world is maybe a little too focused on. I'm curious what you guys think about that, but is certainly focused on coming off of Tuesday.

Anthony Ha

…for tech companies in general and kind of hyperscalers, data center companies in particular. I also imagine that they have to be a little bit worried about, well, like, is this going to continue to be an issue, not just with the people who got elected this year, but potentially in 2028 and beyond?

Kirsten Korosec

…about how we couldn't possibly operate under any other circumstances. And we're already seeing companies like OpenAI all of a sudden go, oh, actually, we can change our policies. They just released what they call a compute campus policy blueprint. And guess what? They're not going to require NDAs anymore. They're going to share their plans and supposedly operate in less secrecy. And so I think what this shows is that when you put up either a regulatory certainty in the marketplace or at least signals of going in that direction, then corporations will respond. If you don't do that, they will not necessarily do the thing that we hope that they will do.

Anthony Ha

Right. One thing I want to emphasize from what you were just talking about is that part of what that's doing beyond laying out these policy changes is also an attempt to rebrand data centers because they have become such a toxic phrase. And so they're not data centers anymore. They are compute…

Kirsten Korosec

I think you just got an endorsement from one of Sean's pups there. From

Sean O'Kane

my dog. Yeah, I mean, like, no, listen, compute campuses are where the super intelligence is made, Anthony. Don't you see how this all comes together? This is just the way it works now. Yeah, I mean, this is ridiculous. Like, come on. Like, it's not going to change anything. It's going to cause…

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

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