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Start free trial →The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Pierce was laying out how badly election night went for the AI industry, calling it the worst possible set of outcomes for anyone bullish on data centers. The ballot tally is his evidence that local opposition is now broad and hard to route around.
Right. To like three or four extremely rich people in particular. Yeah. I do think that picture of the CEOs standing on the dais at the inauguration is truly now going to be one of the like iconic photos of the tech industry.
Yeah.
And it is, it, I, I am so fascinated by what's about to happen in this next moment because like you already saw Elon Musk has been running around like deleting tweets. Everybody's making the jokes that, you know, Sam Altman is going to like change his pronouns. Like all of this stuff, the run back to woke that might happen as these folks just nakedly go after whatever they think is going to work for them politically. It's just going to be really interesting. But I do think to me, the thing that I looked at coming out of this is: oh, if you are a person in America who is bullish on AI, whether you are trying to build data centers, whether you are trying to put AI in front of people, this is the worst possible set of things that could have happened to you. Like you mentioned the data center ballots. We pulled this out and there were 41 measures in 10 states on the ballot this week on Tuesday. All but one of them went against data centers. Some of them were like, you know, pro-data center ballot measures that failed. Some of them were anti-data center ballot measures that succeeded. All of them, but one…
Sure. Democrats and Republicans alike ran on opposing data centers. Democrats in particular ran on opposing big tech and constraining what the AI industry might do. You know, our approach to all this at the verge is always that we do policy, not politics. Like a deep analysis of how the voters in…
Right.
And it's like, well, that's just, that's just bribery. Well, and that's