Should Silicon Valley celebrate Trump's AI plans?

The big AI companies seem to be in a celebratory mood after President Donald Trump unveiled his AI Action Plan — not surprising, perhaps, since the plan was shaped by Trump's Silicon Valley allies. Today, on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, and Anthony Ha look at how the Trump administration plans to reshape the AI landscape, making it harder for environmental regulators to block data center construction, for state governments to oversee AI development and safety, and for tech companies to develop what conservatives see as "woke" AI. Listen to the full episode to hear more about this week's startup and tech news, including: Tesla's fancy new Hollywood diner, featuring Superchargers, a drive-in movie theater, and (supposedly) weird hot dogs. Amazon's acquisition of AI wearable startup Bee and what it might mean for Alexa's future The rapid rise of AI-powered website and app builder Lovable, which recently reached $100 million ARR Figma's plans to raise nearly $1 billion in an IPO, in what looks like a remarkable comeback following a failed acquisition by Adobe Equity will be back for you next week, so don't miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:17Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, July 25. I'm Kirsten Korsak, Transportation Editor at TechCrunch, and I'm joined by Senior AI Reporter Max Sef and Weekend Editor Anthony Ha. Question for you two. I'm not sure if you saw, but the Tesla diner in drive-thru opened up in Hollywood. And Anthony, I know that you're in New York and you probably wouldn't like make a special trip, but if you were in Hollywood, would you go? And would you go as a customer or as we are also seeing a protester?

• 0:59Anthony Ha?

  Well, if I was going to go as a protester, I don't know if I would admit it on this podcast.

• 1:06Anthony Ha?

  But I would say that, yeah, in general, I suspect I would not go out of my way to go to the Tesla diner, both probably because of complicated feelings about Tesla and also because I don't think, I think in general, you shouldn't go out of your way to go to diners. The whole point of diners is that they're like there. I would go, so I have been on road trips in Teslas, you know, and obviously they've got charging stations all over the country. And often they're, once you get out of the cities, they're in these kind of random, empty locations. And compared to like when you go to a gas station and you can go like use the bathroom, get a cup of coffee, like a lot of times you kind of can't do that where the charging stations are. So just having something there actually sounds appealing.

• 1:50Anthony Ha?

  Super fancy diner with all this tech, I'm not sure is necessary, but so maybe they're going for a different use case, but that's what I would use it for.

• 1:58Kirsten Korosec?

  Okay, Max, I have the sense that you would go, this is my bet, that you would go and you might even go out of your way to go.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I would go pretty far to go to this thing. So the thing about the Tesla diner is that Elon Musk has a long hatred with. California, he has this complicated relationship. But you look at the menu at the Tesla diner and it's not like normal diner diner food. Like there's on draft kombucha from, you know, local California farmers markets. All the produce comes from the Santa Monica farmers market. They're like getting all of these fancy SoCal ingredients for like chicken and waffles and smash burgers and hot dogs. So yeah, I'm totally sold as like a Californian who like loves food like this. Like I would definitely go.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  However, I've heard the hot dogs are weird. That's, that's the only thing I've heard about the place so far.

• 2:56Kirsten Korosec?

  Weird how?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  I just heard they're weird. I just heard from someone who went that they're like, yeah, it's, it's like not a normal hot dog. It's kind of weird.

• 3:04Kirsten Korosec?

  So, okay, that's like 100% something you never buy is when someone says it's a weird hot dog, any diner, avoid the weird hot dogs.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  That much is true.

• 3:14Kirsten Korosec?

  But the show is not just about Tesla and hot dogs, Max. What else are we going to talk about today?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have a lot to get into today on the show. So we have deals from Amazon, lovable and Figma. And then we'll get into Trump's newly unveiled AI roadmap that he announced earlier this week. We'll talk about what it means for the tech industry, the energy grid and the future of open models. But first let's get into the deal of the week, which I think is really what's going on with Bee and Amazon. Anthony, can you break down what happened here?

• 3:47Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, so Amazon announced that, or I guess Bee announced and then Amazon confirmed that Amazon is acquiring Bee and that is Bee, E E, like the insect. I know that just hearing it might be a little confusing. And so this is like a wearable startup and the idea is essentially to record everything you say, unless you explicitly mute it and then try to turn that into, you know, to do lists, reminders, things like that. And I think, you know, it's not totally clear what Amazon is going to do with this acquisition. I mean, it's a small enough company that it could really just be pure aqua hire. Who knows what's going to happen to the product? I'll just start by saying out the gate that I, I mean, I think there are products like

• 4:30Anthony Ha?

  this that have already started to take off and can, will continue to take off, but I would never use this, like this sounds horrible. I have no interest in something that's constantly recording my, you know, everything that's happening around me. What about you guys?

• 4:44Kirsten Korosec?

  Okay, I have a question though for you. Do you have an Alexa at home?

• 4:48Anthony Ha?

  I have a Google, I forget what, I feel like there's all these weird names for the Google speakers.

• 4:53Kirsten Korosec?

  Google Home, yeah.

• 4:54Anthony Ha?

  Google Home, yeah, it's a Google, it's one of the little Google Homes, which I, a few years ago, you know, who knows how reliable this is, but I turned the microphone off and I basically never turned it on. So I think, you know, not, maybe this is actually the substance of our discussion is that I know that there are so many devices in our lives that already do this recording. And, you know, when I got the smart speaker, I was like, well, I have an iPhone and it has a microphone. So in theory, it could be recording me all the time. Obviously, there's all these conspiracy theories about that. But I don't want more things in my life than that. I'd like to get to less things. And I mean, it's interesting thinking about something like an Alexa because it's, obviously, that's been a successful product.

• 5:35Anthony Ha?

  It's also, I think there was like all this hype around, oh, this is sort of the next big human computer interface. And I don't think it's quite lived up to that promise yet. Maybe it will, but it hasn't yet.

• 5:46Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, maybe they, so I wasn't trying to like catch you in some sort of like hypocrisy, but I was, I wanted to understand what the line was. And, you know, for me, I tried out the Google Home. I didn't want it, and so I got rid of it. But I have friends, number of them who have, you know, are very much into Alexa. They have their lights connected to it. Like they have all the things, like so they can just talk to Alexa and turn on their lights or turn on their stereo or whatever. And I wonder if Amazon, it's a bit speculative, but like sees this as an extension of. Now, to your point, this could just be an aqua hire and they just are actually not even interested in the product. They're interested in the people.

• 6:28Kirsten Korosec?

  But if we want to play the, like, what if this is a wearables, like, game for Amazon? I, I wonder if it is sort of like, oh, they see a way where this could be an extension of Alexa, just like how they have made the car. An extension of the home-based Alexa. You know, they have some integrated Alexa voice assistants. I would say, in my experience, one of the worst that I experience in cars.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 6:58Kirsten Korosec?

  But it is getting better. I haven't fully enjoyed my experience with it, but they're, but they're absolutely like pushing into the car, looking for ways to push outside of the home. And, you know, this acquisition of B could be very much the path for them to do that.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, you, you see, like, Amazon really wants people to use Alexa, you know, everywhere. And I'm not sure if you guys remember this, but Amazon has a pair of smart glasses called the Frames that I think everyone just collectively, yeah, I think everyone collectively forgot about that the Frames existed, but I, I met with a high up at Amazon a while ago and, and they were, I was like, when are you guys gonna have a wearable to take Alexa with you? And they're like, well, we do. And I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I don't, I don't think anyone knew about that really. But, um, I think they really want, you know, you, you to be able to talk with Alexa instead of talking to your phone. I think like everyone, they're frustrated. You have to go through the iPhone. But I think the problem with something like

• 7:56Speaker 02

  this is that the AI needs to be really smart in order to do something with listening to all of your life and making sense of it. That's kind of the promise of the B that it will be able to, you know, parse your life into kind of nice buckets that you can look at on an app. And the, the problem is that's a really hard task for AI to do, like figuring out what's important in all of the conversations you have in a day to remember. That might literally be AGI, like, as we understand it. And we're just not there yet. So it seems like a very long-term bet.

• 8:33Anthony Ha?

  And you could imagine that a bad version of that would be arguably worse than no version at all because you're counting on it to like, tell you everything important and it's just giving you a bunch of garbage and then you're missing out on what's important. That would not be ideal. And then, of course, there's sort of what I alluded to before, the sort of privacy implications, which I did want to at least acknowledge that B does have sort of its own privacy. Policies around the idea that it's not storing the audio, not using it for AI training, although there's some data around the audio that is being saved. You know, who knows again, how that's going to be translated under Amazon, whether or not, you know, the product itself will be supported at all. But I think it also speaks to this question also, like if we start to have more and more of these wearables, more and more of them are sort of have always on recording,

• 9:16Anthony Ha?

  like what does that mean for sort of our privacy standards? If like, you know, I'm like, hell no, do not record me. But you know, Max and Kirsten are coming in or getting coffee together and they're wearing their devices.

• 9:29Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, totally. I was thinking about this because we see this with the glasses. Like Max, you have you, I know you tested them. I don't know. Are you like a daily user of the Meta glasses?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  I would say I use them on like a weekly basis. Yeah.

• 9:44Kirsten Korosec?

  Okay, but there is an indicator when people know that they're being recorded, right?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's like a big part of them. It's like they have a flashing light when, you know, the recording is on. Because, I mean, that was a big problem with Google Glass is people were terrified about the fact of just being in a surveillance state.

• 10:02Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  That kind of feels like what Amazon is going for here with B surveillance state kind of always listed device. But I'm not sure how else you see it, but uh, yeah.

• 10:12Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, so there are also state laws about recording. There are states in which you can record with only one person being aware of that, which is the person who's doing the recording. But there are many states, it's a two, it's considered a two party state, which is you have to inform, like if I go and get coffee with Anthony, I have to say, hey, I'm recording you right now, just FYI. Are you okay with that? And so that to me is a societal shift. There's like some regulatory and privacy questions. To like, change the subject slightly though, I'm wondering if this acquisition, Max, and you might have the most insight into this is, is this something that we're seeing like consolidation in wearables?

• 10:55Kirsten Korosec?

  Or is this just kind of like a one off?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the thing we're seeing not necessarily in wearables, but just the AI startups space broadly is that a lot of these companies are now just running out of cash, their businesses are proving to be unsustainable. And, you know, there's a lot of interest in, you know, big tech companies kind of acquiring the talent, acquiring the kind of tech that'll catch, save them a few months to catch up with OpenAI and Google and whatnot. I think that's what Amazon's doing here. They acquired Adept, an AI startup that was building AI agents a while back that helped them kind of get ahead. But that's kind of the two buckets that I'm seeing in the AI wearables and just AI space

• 11:40Speaker 02

  more broadly is some startups are really starting to just run out of runway here. Whereas others have kind of turned into these Goliaths that have really done well. And that is a good transition to a startup we're going to talk about next, which is Lovable.

• 11:56Kirsten Korosec?

  I have a lot of questions about Lovable because I don't really know a ton about this company and just has been, but I know that it's like super hot right now. It's a Swedish startup. They have this AI-powered website and app builder. And I guess the big news here, Max, fill me in a little bit, but they've sort of crossed this 100 million milestone. Why should I care about that at all?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question. And it's because most AR startups don't make any money. And there's a very small bucket that have crossed this 100 million ARR threshold at all. Lovable has kind of fallen into a similar strategy as companies like Cursor and Windsurf with these AI subscription plans, charge users $25 a month and you get a certain amount of usage and people seem to love it. What's interesting about Lovable is that unlike Cursor and Windsurf, I think Lovable gets grouped in as kind of a vibe coder too, but Lovable is really targeted to people with no coding experience whatsoever. It's, you can build full-blown applications with

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Pretty much no coding experience whatsoever. They don't ask you to interact with a codebase. It's just a natural language interface and you can build an app. We've seen a couple of other startups doing this. Wix, the website building website, just acquired a startup that did this base 44. But Lovable seems to be the biggest one here. And I kind of think that this is where all of the vibe coding is just going. Where it's that you just don't have to interact with code at all and that you can just use chat to just build products and apps.

• 13:39Anthony Ha?

  Well, one thing that stuck out to me going over, you know, just the information the company has put out is not, I mean, the 100 million AR number is super impressive. Also, like, the customers include Klarna and HubSpot. So like, this isn't just individuals sort of doing stuff for fun or, you know, weird spammy app shops, although I'm sure those are using it too. But like, these are like real businesses actually like building on the platform.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is interesting because you think that, you know, these businesses would use something like a cursor or a windsurf so that they could kind of get into the code and, and you know, really fine tune this stuff. But I think these tools are just getting pretty good for this kind of thing. And there's a lot of interest in just companies giving tools to their employees so they can move faster. So I think these enterprise deals for vibe coders are starting to become a much bigger and more competitive space.

• 14:33Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I guess the question that I have is, and I see that there are like, that 100 million AR milestone is hard to hit. There are some companies that are hitting it. And I guess the broad question is like, what's special about these companies? Is it because that's the perfect combination of easy to use, no coding experience necessary at all and enterprise use? As opposed to? Oh, this is just to use for fun? Like, what's the difference between these types of companies like lovable making money and some others that simply just don't seem to be able to make any revenue?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  That's a really good question. I think it's hard to tell what exactly it is that separates, you know, the successful companies from the unsuccessful ones. I think that, you know, lovable, cursor and winter have just built really easy to use products that are just very easy to integrate with people's lives. I think that an interesting thing about them is that, you know, they all are using the same kind of models. They're all using anthropics, Claude, open AIs, chat GPT and Google Gemini. And they've just built it into this very seamless experience where, you know, you're not stuck kind of filling in the gaps all day for some AI model. Like, they've just kind of been able to fine tune the models and create these

• 15:52Speaker 02

  just convincing products out of them. And yeah, I think it's really fascinating, especially lovable, just because of the no code aspect. They've also done this incredibly fast. You know, they were just really like, I think, less than a year old here and they've already just taken off.

• 16:11Kirsten Korosec?

  So I could hear like all the VCs who listen to this screaming like product market fit, you know? But I mean, I think to your, you were sort of getting to that point, which is that lovable has created this like perfect combination and product market fit for this moment in time. And it's really done really well. And I guess the root of my question is really about like, is this something that can be duplicated by others? Or is lovable and some of these other companies just like unique and special and the rest are going to kind of fall to the wayside? Because to your point, a lot of them are using the same models. So that's not the special differentiator.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, my take on this whole vibe coding space is that these are all different like products, like some are in your kind of AI powered, integrated development environment. Some are in your command line. Some are just a website that you use. I think they're all converging towards the same thing, which is that they're trying to build these agents that can just do work for you. And I think that we're going to see that more and more of these companies that seem slightly differentiated are just competing for the same thing. And now the AI labs are starting to pay attention. So we'll see how defensible these businesses are.

• 17:24Kirsten Korosec?

  I wanted to try to sneak in one more deal before we go into the themes. Not too much to say about it yet, but it is my favorite topic, which is IPOs. And this is Figma. They have come out and said they're, they're looking to raise nearly a billion dollars. They've kicked off their IPO roadshow and I'm hoping that by, maybe not next week, but let's say a couple of weeks from now when we record, we'll have more to say because they're going to be wrapping that up here in the next week or so. I don't know if you've been following this at all, but Figma's Dylan Field is apparently like going to cash out about 60 million in the IPO. So I thought that was interesting. It's always fun to see like who's going to benefit from this.

• 18:09Kirsten Korosec?

  Index, Kleiner, Greylock, Sequoia are all going to sell too. And so we don't have a ton of info yet, but wondering if Anthony or Max, if you've followed this at all, or if you have any opinions on how the company might do in an IPO.

• 18:24Anthony Ha?

  I mean, I think the thing to me that stands up most, and maybe this is just sort of a basic history lesson that a lot of our listeners are familiar with. But you know, obviously Figma had this whole drama around a massive, you know, 20 billion acquisition from Adobe that ultimately fell through because it looked like regulators were not going to allow it to go through. And I think there was really a sense of like, how is, is Figma going to be able to sort of continue after this? Or is this essentially, is the, is the company in, in serious trouble? And like you said, we're in the hopes and dreams space. Maybe all these numbers are going to be a lot lower once, once we actually start seeing some documentations, once it actually goes public. But it does just seem like a real turnaround. I mean, this, the, I think the market cap under the current numbers would be more like 15 billion.

• 19:09Anthony Ha?

  So not quite at the level of the Adobe acquisition, but you know, these are still like very impressive numbers. And, and I can also imagine that, you know, investors, founders, after having their sort of hopes dashed a few years ago, are especially eager to, to cash out right now.

• 19:26Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, the nuts and bolts that we know right now is that they're planning to offer about 36 million shares of Class A stock. They're looking at pricing it between 25 and 28 a share. Anthony, to your point, like we'll see where that all falls out. The thing is, is that I'm always fascinated about how there's so much attention on like the debut and like how well it does. But as someone who covers and follows a lot of these publicly traded companies, like, sure, there's a lot of money to be made, I guess. But for the average retail investor, like, they're not a part of that. Some of these companies have massive IPOs. And then a year or two later, they're like fairly disappointing. I mean, look at Rivian. EV startup, very different field, had one of the largest IPOs a couple of years ago of the

• 20:10Kirsten Korosec?

  year, off the top of my head, I want to say 72 a share. It's, I think, trading around maybe 13 as of last week when I was looking at it. Obviously, things have really changed on that front. So to me, it's like, okay, first hurdle, getting to the, you know, debuting, but then the next, and that's almost harder, which is like sustaining and growing. And I think for a company like Figma, you know, that could be, that could be difficult. And I would think that their hope for them would be more of a slow burn than like some big boom-bust cycle. I think that they would hope to avoid that.

• 20:46Anthony Ha?

  I don't know, some of them might enjoy a big boom. Hard to say or read their minds. I mean, I think the other thing about Figma, right, obviously, this has been sort of one of the leading names in design for a long time. And I think one of the things that Max you're alluding to in our discussion before around lovable is also like this sense of like a lot of these different products converging. And I know Figma has been talking about AI. I don't have a great sense of how widely that's implemented right now. But these are things that in the past definitely would have felt very distinct. But I'm curious to see if like, again, the idea that you can sort of with something like lovable, like spin up a website or an app with AI that like, what role does sort of then AI power of design play in that in the future? I mean, I think these are questions for like, years in the future, and maybe not, maybe it'll happen a lot

• 21:31Anthony Ha?

  sooner. But I think that the categories that we have in our head about what software does and doesn't compete with each other, I can imagine a lot of those things starting to collapse in the near future as well.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it feels like Figma is just kind of starting to venture into the AI design stuff. Like earlier this week, they rolled out this prompt to app kind of coding tool called Figma Make, and it's very similar to what we're talking about with Lovable and, you know, kind of all of these AI coding assistants. I think that there's going to be a lot of these kinds of tools out there. But I do think that Figma is in a particularly good position. Yeah, I'm excited to see what they do. I was curious, and you alluded to like after this IPO and, you know, how they do as a public company.

• 22:18Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, after. After is an important word because we are going to go to break. But after we get back from the break, we are going to dig into more AI stuff, but specifically on the policy side. I have a lot to talk about. I edited many of Max's stories this week about Trump's AI action plan. So we'll see you after the break.

• 22:41Anthony Ha?

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• 23:08Kirsten Korosec?

  I want to get right into this AI action plan. And I, as I mentioned, like I edited a lot of Max's stories, Rebecca Blons. There was a bunch of folks who are writing all about this. And to me, the big takeaway was I wasn't really surprised by the contents of it. And it was, as I expected and many others, you know, a big departure from the previous administration. But that's kind of vague. So Max, what did it say?

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Trump unveiled his AI action plan, which Kirsten, you put it well earlier this week. This is really Trump's blueprint for the next several years of what he's going to do around AI. And I think the TLDR version of it is he's trying to cut red tape that is making it difficult for tech companies to build out AI. There's not a lot of AI regulation today, but Trump made very clear that he wants there to not be a lot of regulation at the state levels. He told states effectively to not put up any roadblocks that will make

• 24:20Speaker 02

  it difficult to build AI data centers or to release AI models. There was also a large focus in Trump's AI action plan on just getting rid of what he calls woke AI. It actually made it into the executive order. It was called, you know, getting rid of woke AI. And what he means by this is AI that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion. There were some incidents early on in the AI era of chatbots making certain historical figures inaccurate races. And a lot of Republicans took this to mean that companies like Google

• 25:00Speaker 02

  and OpenAI were injecting kind of DEI values into their chatbots. And this is something the Republican Party has really latched on to. And they're saying, you have to make your AI chatbots fair and unbiased in order for the US to work with you. And there's a lot to unpack in all of this of what it means. But I think the big thing that people can take away is that this is Trump's build, baby build plan for the AI era. And this is not a, it's a very different stance from what Biden had. And he doesn't want to be overly cautious. He wants us to accelerate, win the AI race with China, and do it in a way that really reflects Trump's values.

• 25:45Anthony Ha?

  Right, and I mean, you talked about this idea of that he's trying to get rid of all this red tape, but I do think that idea of sort of not having woke AI is a pretty massive asterisk to that because I think we've seen in on so many levels, you know, most recently, you know, with the universities that when, when, when the Trump administration says they're like trying to support free speech, they have a very specific definition, which often means going in ripping out a lot of funding. And, and what they mean by free speech is they mean conservative speech, right? And it's about pushing these models far to the right, which, you know, we've seen what that can look like with, with Grok. So I can imagine in some ways, a big AI company is, has a lot more freedom to sort of develop and roll things out. But also, you've got the Trump

• 26:27Anthony Ha?

  administration looking over your shoulder saying, hey, hey, don't, don't say anything that's too liberal, or you're going to be in serious trouble.

• 26:34Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, and Rebecca Bellan had a great story about this that, you know, is just starting, by the way, to, to get into this idea. But she kicked off the story, talking about how Western AI companies have used China as a comparison of what, hey, look, we have a lot more to provide because we aren't censored, we are therefore more valuable. This is actually something that puts us ahead globally. But then with this executive order, and of course, a little bit TBD on how it is implemented, we have some hints as to how that's going to happen. Essentially, what it's saying is if you're going to get a federal contract, if you are an AI model provider, and there are companies that already have some of these

• 27:19Kirsten Korosec?

  contracts in place, you would have to adhere to this unbiased language. The question is, who's determining what is unbiased and what is objective and what is neutral? And does that actually do the opposite of what all these companies were holding up as sort of our value globally and, and what made us leaders? So we'll see how it plays out. But to me, this is like the big, tough contradiction here that's happening, which is, how do you have a free and open marketplace?

• 27:55Kirsten Korosec?

  Capitalism, right? And also then push for essentially what could be censorship of speech if you want to get these contracts? And then who, at the end of the day, pays for that? And who benefits from it? And that's like, that's the big looming question to me, which is, you know, essentially at the end of the day, like taxpayers are paying for any kind of federal contract. You know, this is usually based off of, you know, budgets and appropriations and this is collected through taxes. What do we get as, as a result? And are we getting a worse result because of attempts to control language or how these models are created?

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but and I want to talk about the industries that are affected by this. I think this has a lot of impacts for mainly the energy industry. But I did want to just note that, like, you know, just specifically on the woke AI executive order. I mean, this was like the biggest culture battle in the last 10 years was, you know, Republicans fighting over social media apps. That was kind of where the culture wars took out about speech. It really feels like what's been mounting for the last six months roughly is that Trump is really setting his sight on AI chatbots to be the next kind of culture war for Republicans in Silicon Valley.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  This is going to be an area where we're going to probably have to figure out whether the responses of AI chatbots are categorized as free speech. There was just a ruling in Florida where a judge ruled that AI chatbots responses are not free speech. I have to imagine that this is an issue will get pressed though, because I think that we're going to see some fighting here about, you know, what companies are allowed to put in their responses, whether that's not allowed. And how the Trump administration enforces that, we have to see. They've assigned a federal agency to come up with a plan in three months for how they're going to enforce this. But

• 30:02Speaker 02

  We'll see what that looks like. On the AI data center side of it, I do just want to say that like this is a massive deal for energy companies. Trump has really promised to clear the way to just build out an insane amount of data centers across the country, even suggesting that they open up federal lands, which includes national parks and protected wildlife centers to build data centers, but also to build energy production areas is what they call it, which could be interpreted to mean a lot of things, but I think it could mean, you know, potentially like fracking in protected areas and stuff like that. So I think that this is really going to have consequences far outside of just OpenAI and Google, but

• 30:47Speaker 02

  could really end up resulting everyday Americans in a way that was not quite clear until we actually read this.

• 30:54Anthony Ha?

  And I think it's worth thinking about that in the context of also, you know, obviously the Trump administration is really changing energy policy and really trying to de-emphasize all the progress that the Biden administration made in terms of clean energy. And so when we talk about what's going to power these data centers, I think that mix could end up looking very different as well.

• 31:15Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, to that point, though, I think the economic drive of and just simply what can be stood up faster, forget about anything that Trump is de-emphasizing, the marketplace will bear out that renewables will be what data centers go to because of the simple fact that they can be implemented much faster than any sort of natural gas power plant. It just simply economics and time. So Trump can do whatever he wants to de-emphasize that, but a data center company that needs to stand up and get power immediately and wants to do and may even have their own internal, you know, goals around carbon zero emissions, putting up and getting regulatory, jumping through those hoops and also just simply

• 32:00Kirsten Korosec?

  building a solar array is faster than it is building a natural gas power plant. So that actually still holds true and we see that a lot. I mean, a lot of the deals that we write about on the climate desk are these renewables that are being used to power these data centers. To me, what's really going to be interesting is that this is going to end up coming all the way down to a local level for a lot of people because if essentially he holds true with You know, this build, baby, build, which is, you know, for those who think that that might sound familiar, it's, you know, very close to drill, baby, drill. And this idea of like progress at any and all costs and remove all barriers.

• 32:44Kirsten Korosec?

  But their barriers still exist, even if you want to remove them at the federal level. And things like zoning, for instance, and available power and water are simple, real challenges. So in Arizona, where I live, there's been this much talked about Project Blue. It's, you know, what is this secretive data center? And it turns out it looks like it's going to be AWS. This is in southern Arizona. This is in the desert. We have water sources, they're limited and they're also taken by agriculture. So you see at a local level, this becoming suddenly number one priority. So this isn't just like a very distant, top level federal thing.

• 33:25Kirsten Korosec?

  The thing that's going to be interesting to me is going to be see how companies like Crusoe, for instance, who have made it their business to find ways to either use renewables or in how they really even got started was tapping into natural gas that was being naturally flared off, essentially waste product, to power data centers. And if that is going to actually become a go-to for data centers, it will become more of the norm because of resistance that they might get from local communities, that they're going to simply have to find other ways to power these data centers because it's in direct competition, particularly during the summer and in hot climates, in direct competition

• 34:10Kirsten Korosec?

  with, you know, the average American and, and also other industries, by the way, that are using the power grid.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think that across America, this is going to be felt in pretty significant ways. It's projected that by 2030, before this. AI action plan was passed. It was projected that by 2030, data centers would roughly like like double in the amount of energy that they're pulling from the grid, which is not an insignificant amount. I think there's a lot of fear that this will cause kind of energy instability for areas that are close to AI data centers and just strain America's grid a lot. Yeah, they just have to come up with new ways to create more energy, basically. And I think that Trump's AI action plan really accelerates that. I will say that

• 35:02Speaker 02

  among the people I've talked to in Silicon Valley, I think that they are really excited about this plan, which maybe is unsurprising, given that Trump took a lot of their feedback into consideration with creating this plan. And actually, former VCs were heavily involved in designing this, people from Andreessen Horowitz and David Sacks from Kraft. And so I think that maybe this is not quite a shock, but I think it is just notable that Silicon Valley is extremely happy about this broadly. I've actually, I feel like Silicon Valley is usually very divisive over kind of AI policy plans like this. But I've seen a lot of people from many different camps just really excited about the idea of just building more.

• 35:47Kirsten Korosec?

  Building more and faster. I think that is the theme of the show today. But we are way over time, actually. And so, thank you so much. Thanks, of course, Max and Anthony for joining me on the show. And we will be back next week. Until then, you can find Equity under the handle at EquityPod on X and Threads.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconso with editing by Kel. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.