The A.I. Revolt Is Here

What’s big and ugly and has united Republicans and Democrats? A. I. data centers. An overwhelming majority of Americans say they’d oppose a data center being built near where they live. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul just imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction, and there are over 100 other local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. A. I.’s explosive momentum over the last few years seems to have finally run into a force that could slow it down: the messy politics of getting things done in the real world. So, is that a good thing, or a bad thing? And how much is the data center backlash about the actual construction of these buildings, and how much is it about A. I. itself? Jasmine Sun has an excellent newsletter covering both the culture inside the A. I. companies and the anger that’s been building against them. And she just finished a reporting trip in the Midwest, where she interviewed people on all sides of the data center fight. So I wanted to talk to her about what she saw and what she thinks A. I. companies can learn from the growing movement against them. Mentioned: @jasmine’s Substack Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass by Jasmine Sun Sam Bankman-Fried on Arbitrage and Altruism (Ep. 145) Is Your Social Life Missing Something? This Conversation Is for You. With Priya Parker, The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut The Technology Trap by Carl Benedikt Frey The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kelsey Lannin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Kyle Kelley. Video editing by Brandon Belk-Yee, Steph Khoury and Arpita Aneja. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lin and Emma Kehlbeck. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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

• 0:27Ezra Klein?

  What is big, ugly, and has united Republicans and Democrats at a time when it has felt like nothing else could? AI data centers. Last August, a Heat Map News poll found that about 4 in 10 voters would oppose a data center being built where they live. By May of this year, opposition grew to 7 in 10. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, of course, has proposed a new Citizens Bill of Rights for AI.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  The incentives of big tech are not the same as what's in the interest of the people and the public.

• 1:00Ezra Klein?

  Senator Bernie Sanders called for a national data center moratorium.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  This moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing and make sure that the benefits of these technologies work for all of us, not just the wealthiest people on earth.

• 1:21Ezra Klein?

  There are over 100 local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. And here in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul, not usually thought of as a hardcore populist, just imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  These hyperscale AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, truly threatening to outpace our grid's capacity, and they drive up costs for local ratepayers. And I refuse to let those costs be passed on to New Yorkers, who already paid too much for their utility bills.

• 1:55Ezra Klein?

  So I wanted to get into the fight over data centers. How much of this is really about water, or electricity, or aesthetics? And how much is about AI itself and the companies that are behind it? My guest today is Jasmine Sun. Jasmine has been doing excellent coverage of both the culture inside the AI companies, unusual culture, and the anger that is building against them in the rest of the country. I highly recommend following her Substack, but right now, she just finished a reporting trip in the Midwest, talking to the people organizing against these data centers. And I wanted to hear what she'd learned. Jasmine Sun, welcome to the show.

• 2:38Speaker 04

  I'm so excited to be here.

• 2:40Ezra Klein?

  So you just got back from a reporting trip in Wisconsin and Michigan covering the fight over data centers. Let's just start with what you see when you're near a data center. What does it look like?

• 2:52Speaker 04

  I think one of the most important things about rural Wisconsin and rural Michigan is how beautiful it is. I felt like I was in Eden. I felt like I was in paradise. It's incredibly lush, incredibly green. And as you get closer to a data center, you start to see more power lines, you start to see more towers, and eventually, you just see what looks like an extremely large, flat warehouse. But you just see this sort of verdant landscape give way to what is a windowless industrial park. Data centers are very ugly. I think I didn't appreciate this until I started standing in front of them, getting near them, listening to them.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  People will time how long it takes to drive past a data center on the highway going 70 miles per hour in Port Washington. I think it's like a minute and 42 seconds. The size of these things--

• 3:44Ezra Klein?

  That's a long on a highway.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  It is a long, long ride. Like, these hyperscale data centers are huge. They are massive. And so I think that the aesthetic questions, right, around, is this what I want my state, my community, to look like? These are really salient to people.

• 4:01Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned hearing them.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:04Ezra Klein?

  What do they sound like?

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. I mean, they sound like humming, buzzing, whirring. Every once in a while, you'll hear a rattling.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Residents who live next door to some of them say they're producing noise that's not only annoying, but debilitating, like this right here.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  But again, they're windowless. There are not that many workers inside. So they're very mechanical sounds. They are inhuman, as a lot of folks would say.

• 4:32Ezra Klein?

  So you spent a lot of time with people organizing against data centers. Who were they?

• 4:38Speaker 04

  You had stay-at-home moms. You had retired executives. You had farmers who didn't like the impacts on their land. You had activists, professional activists, with environmental groups in the state. It was an interesting mix of people, but a lot of women, relatively more left-leaning, there are definitely some right-leaning folks as well.

• 5:01Ezra Klein?

  So one question I've heard people ask is, how much is this different than other kinds of industrial installations? I mean, there are a lot of things that are built all over the country that you wouldn't necessarily want to be right next to. Are data centers unusual in this? Or are they, you know, from fracking to industrial agriculture, just like the latest version of it?

• 5:26Speaker 04

  It's a good question. It's one I had and thought a lot about before I went. And I've talked to city officials who are confused by this question of, we had a chip fab here, we had an auto plant here, we had a fulfillment center here, and nobody cared as much. Why are data centers so much more unpopular than, say, solar farms, which also faced local opposition in places like Michigan? And so I think while the quality of life concerns around this thing is loud and annoying and ugly and consumes resources are very similar to other industrial projects, there must be some reason that opposition is so much more severe and widespread, even beyond the communities where the data centers are literally being built.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  And I think that question has a lot to do with the AI, with the AI industry, and sort of the way that people feel about these companies and these projects.

• 6:17Ezra Klein?

  When I read your reporting on this, when I've talked to people involved in this, it always feels to me there's sort of three layers of concerns that are converging into what we call the data center backlash. There's process. Then there's direct impacts, you know, the environment, water, electricity. And then there's AI itself. And maybe let's go through them sort of one by one. One thing that I have been hearing a lot of, and I've seen in your reporting as well, is the anger over how these processes are going, and in particular, the use of NDAs.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:52Ezra Klein?

  Which is not that common, right? I've covered a lot of, what does it take to build a housing development? And you don't tend to hear a lot of the city councilmen got put under an NDA.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:01Ezra Klein?

  So what is happening with these NDAs?

• 7:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, this is also something that really surprised me. And I think the NDAs--

• 7:08Ezra Klein?

  I should say, non-disclosure agreements.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Right, the non-disclosure agreements. This has really inflamed the amount of local opposition that you see. And so basically, what would happen oftentimes is there would be some sense, starting in city council, that maybe a big development project was going to show up. But because of the NDAs, the council members would not be able to disclose that necessarily it was a data center, necessarily who the customers were going to be, a company like OpenAI, or a company like Anthropic, or whoever. Or even the size of the project, like, how much electricity is this actually going to consume? But whispers would start to get around. I was talking to a VP of a construction union, and he was saying, you know, there's an old Irish saying, the only way to keep a secret between three people is to kill two of them, which I thought was hilarious.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  And so he's saying, when these developers show up, they talk to the general contractor, the general contractor talks to all their subcontractors, the subcontractors talk to all their workers. Yes, maybe everyone is signing NDAs at every part of that process, but whispers get around. And as soon as whispers get around, you start to get social media posts, you start to get rumors. And the city council, because they are beholden to these NDAs, they lose the ability to get ahead of the social media narrative. That was something I repeatedly heard from these local government officials, was, we could not get ahead of social media because we had signed an NDA and rumors started getting around.

• 8:26Ezra Klein?

  But why do the companies want these NDAs signed?

• 8:28Speaker 04

  I mean, I think they didn't think about it. They didn't realize there would be a backlash. They just thought it would be easier in case they changed their mind. These companies sign lots of NDAs with their own workers, with anyone who works with them. I don't think there's a good reason. Microsoft has actually decided to stop using NDAs because of the level of backlash. I've heard from people managing compute at some of the other AI labs that they are thinking of making the same decision. One thing that surprised me is all of the pro-data-center, pro-build people who I spoke to, whether workers or AI developers, they all regret the NDAs. They all think that they made the situation much worse.

• 9:04Ezra Klein?

  What is the impact of a new data center on water usage, water availability in a town?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  They do require some of it, obviously, primarily for cooling the data centers, because these chips and servers run really hot and they need AC. The thing that's gone a bit wrong in the water debate, I think, is that today's new data centers are almost all closed-loop systems, closed-loop in the same way that air conditioning is closed-loop, which means they're recycling the water within the system, and they use a fraction of the water that, you know, golf courses use. And in fact, in places like Janesville, Wisconsin, we would often see a literal golf course right next to the data center site. But they do use some, and it has sort of become a very sticky icon of, like, these things, resource consumption. A lot of folks I talked to in Wisconsin and Michigan, they would say things like, you know, they're building right by the Great Lakes.

• 9:54Speaker 04

  Why would they do that if they weren't trying to drain the lakes? Why would they do that if they didn't need all this fresh water?

• 9:59Ezra Klein?

  And so your view is, at this point, the technology has changed, such that water is not as big of a deal as maybe it actually was a couple of years ago? I think the next thing people have heard a lot about is energy usage.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 10:11Ezra Klein?

  So walk me through that.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Uh, the electricity consumption issue is real. So um, data centers do in fact use an incredible amount of electricity. Um, these uh, these chips and these servers that are processing gigantic mathematical calculations to make AI work require tons of energy. All these chips and clusters are talking to each other. You need the interconnections to be really fast in order to get like a chat GPT answer really quickly with low latency. You need these super fast connections, all of us powered by electricity. So we are talking about a really, really significant amount of new electricity that is going to require new generators, new power plants. It's probably going to be natural gas in the near future. Once a data center is fully operational, there is not a ton of air and water pollution, assuming that everything's working correctly.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  They are relatively clean facilities. But you know, like a lot of folks are concerned about the electricity use. They're saying, yeah, maybe the data center doesn't use that much water. Maybe the data center doesn't pollute that much. But what about all of these, you know, new power plants that they're going to build in order to power it?

• 11:14Ezra Klein?

  When the tech companies come into these towns and begin talking to the city council members, when they begin talking to the community, what are they sort of promising on the one hand, right? This, this is why this will be good for you. And what are they asking for on the other?

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so these things do provide an incredible amount of tax revenue, right? And so um, in Mount Pleasant, the, on the old Foxconn site, which ended up being bought out by Microsoft, they saw, oh, there's all this infrastructure already here. Why don't we build a hyperscale data center on this unused industrially zoned land? Uh, Microsoft is on track to pay nineteen point six million dollars in property taxes in two thousand twenty six. This is expected to continue for many years. Again, this is a small village of twenty eight thousand people. Um, and so there are really meaningful property tax benefits. And I do think, I find it frustrating personally when anti-data center organizers say that the job creation is a myth. Because I think that five hundred, you know, maybe six-figure jobs for folks who go through apprenticeships

• 12:12Speaker 04

  that maybe don't need college degrees that last two to six years, that's enough time to build a family. That's enough time to buy a home. I think it's super meaningful. And when I talk to technicians, when I talk to workers, clearly it was extremely meaningful work. Um, I think what, one of the things that was the most surprising to me when I talked to data center activists was that they, and they responded to so many of the pro arguments with, I don't believe them. So like, this company says that they are going to treat the water with chemicals in it so that it doesn't flow into the lakes. People would say, I don't believe them. I don't think they can do it. People would say, uh, the companies would say, we are going to cover uh, the cost of our own electricity grid build out.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  We are going to ensure that rates do not go up for all Michiganders. Um, a lot of folks would say, I don't believe them. DTE has raised our electricity rates basically every year since two thousand twenty two. Why would this be the year that they decide not to do it? I do not believe them. They are going, the, we are going to create five hundred jobs and some of these will stick around after the data center is built. People just said, I don't believe them. It was really clear to me that data centers are showing up in an environment of extremely low trust in both governments and in corporations to the extent where the pro arguments almost do not land because people just aren't interested in anything an outside tech company is going to tell them. They say they have big PR teams, they can say whatever they want.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  One thing that became really obvious to me when I talked about people at the AI companies and local officials is that two years ago, no one thought the data center backlash was going to be like this. And so these companies were in fact looking for things like, um, does this state have a sales tax exemption as Wisconsin does to ensure that they don't have to pay sales taxes on their very expensive chips, on their very expensive GPUs? Um, they were often looking to build in places that might even offer local subsidies to the companies for building in that area. I think that a lot of the balance of power has shifted as local opposition has ramped up. Um, now it's the case that I'm hearing from some local officials. If we did this again today, we wouldn't have to offer any subsidies.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Because in fact, now there is so much local opposition that the developers are really looking, where is there going to be a community, a local community and a government that is friendly to our project? How can we, you know, have a Christmas tree ornaments worth of community benefits agreements? And so just the nature of these deals and how much they are skewed towards communities versus the AI developers has really changed.

• 14:43Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that came up a lot in your reporting and that I thought was interesting was the fear that this is a bubble.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 14:50Ezra Klein?

  And what's going to happen is your community will agree to something. And then in the middle, the bubble is going to pop and you're going to end up with a half-finished data center or one that is not being kept up correctly or something where the, you know, promised benefits don't emerge. I mean, you were in Wisconsin, which had a very, very bad experience with Foxconn.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:12Ezra Klein?

  Which seems to be structuring the way people are thinking about at least some of this. So talk to me a bit about that, uh, set of concerns.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. I think in terms of what people in these communities with these data centers feel when they see the projects come in with their gigantic, like, two billion dollars of investment, like these gigantic numbers that are being dangled, it feels like a bubble to them. One, they're seeing news articles saying maybe AI is a bubble. We don't know it's a bubble, but it could be. Two, you do have experiences like Foxconn where you have a big tech company show up in a very small community. In this case, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, a city of like twenty eight thousand people. It's not very big. Get, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure investment and tax subsidy from the, from the town, promise thirteen thousand high-paying manufacturing jobs and then pull out because the contract wasn't set up correctly.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  They decided they didn't actually want to build a bunch of flat-screen TVs in Wisconsin. And the, you know, the town is left on the hook, having invested all of this money in the grid and in roads. They got, I think, a thousand jobs in the end. Foxconn is still paying back all of this debt that has been accumulated. And so experiences like that have really, really soured people on the question of when an outside big tech company comes in and, you know, promises these gigantic numbers and all of these jobs and all of this tax revenue. And it's for this technology that like you can't, a lot of people, they don't see, they don't feel, they don't find personally extremely, extremely useful, not at the levels of these valuations. They have a lot of questions about if the bubble pops, are we going to be the ones left with a stranded asset in our community? I mean, in Janesville, Wisconsin, um, it was famously the site of this hundred-year-old GM plant.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  Um, that was the centerpiece of the community that employed a ton of people. When they left during the financial crash in two thousand eight and the plant closed down, not only did it sort of devastate the community from a work perspective, um, but they also left thirty million dollars of contamination and hazardous waste in the middle of the city that has never been cleaned up. There's forever chemicals in there. This is why developers have not been able to sell this brownfield is because there's so much waste that GM never cleaned up. And so I think that people worry about what happens if the AI bubble pops. If maybe it doesn't pop and the data center developers just decide, never mind, we want to build elsewhere, never mind, this data center isn't good enough. We have newer, better technology and who's going to be left holding the bag? That was the question I heard over and over again.

• 17:34Ezra Klein?

  But this is something that I do think is in people's minds.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:37Ezra Klein?

  You, you bring this in and right now you're at this time of very, very high valuations.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:42Ezra Klein?

  And if AI demand isn't quite what you think, or even just the company that was behind this particular data center is not part of the winner's circle, then in a couple of years, what you got is this like giant box.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:55Ezra Klein?

  That's not going to continue being valuable. And so whatever the promised benefits are from it, you know, tax revenue, et cetera. Yeah, maybe they show up for a while.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:05Ezra Klein?

  But then what if in five years they're gone, but you are left with this infrastructure? It's like, they can leave Janesville.

• 18:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 18:12Ezra Klein?

  With no real concern. They're not there, their people don't live there, right? But if you're in Janesville, you do live there.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah.

• 18:18Ezra Klein?

  And it's a real concern.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  You see, you see things like this with Elon's giant Colossus data centers, right? That he built out in Memphis.

• 18:24Ezra Klein?

  And what makes people feel better about a new construction project in their town than calling it Colossus?

• 18:29Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, these things.

• 18:33Ezra Klein?

  An unerring touch for those people.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  I mean, so usually the thing that happens is they give them very cutesy names like Project Cannoli and The Barn. And they try to make them sound as friendly as possible. But yeah, I mean, with Colossus, XAI never really took off. People are not in fact using Grok as much as Elon thought he, they were going to be using it. And in that case, he was able to get a really good deal selling the compute capacity to Anthropic, which was growing like crazy and had not built enough data centers on their side. But you could totally imagine a world, as you say, where in fact, you know, XAI decides we are going to focus on space. We don't care about AI anymore. Maybe there's not an Anthropic to pick up the bill because Anthropic has maybe built enough of their own compute capacity. There is an open question about what happens in that world.

• 19:17Ezra Klein?

  So I heard Abundance, uh, last year with Derek Thompson.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  I heard.

• 19:21Ezra Klein?

  Published it. And one thing I've heard been asked by a lot of people, like, what does the abundance take on a data center? And the, like, the beginning of that book has this line that, uh, you know, the question is, what do we need more of and how do we get it?

• 19:37Ezra Klein?

  And I think the question here that has been so hard for the AI companies, for the people trying to build data centers, is actually getting people to believe they need more of them, right? When you're talking about building affordable housing, when you're talking about, you know, building an array of solar panels or wind turbines, there's a pretty legible argument.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:02Ezra Klein?

  For why you need that, right? People still may not like it, but we need homes because we need places for people to live. We need solar panels because we need clean renewable energy. How much is this like a normal kind of, I don't even exactly want to call it nimbyism, but uh, but a normal kind of, I don't want the industrial infrastructure built in my backyard because like, you know, what am I going to get out of that? And how much of it is actually something that is more related to people's feelings about AI? Which is, I don't want this built here because why would I want to pay the cost for a thing that I don't want there to even be more of in the first place?

• 20:45Speaker 04

  This, I think, was one of my big motivating questions going into this trip is, is it quote unquote, normal nimbyism? Is it about AI? Is it about something else? And so I spent time both looking at polls and trying to talk to people about, would you be excited if this was a chip factory, which would use a lot more water and pollute a lot more? Would you be excited if it was a solar farm? Also, maybe acquiring agricultural land and turning it into industrial use? Would you be excited if it was a million other things? And I talked to Nick Bagley, who you've had on your show about, is this just proceduralism? And we talked about the solar farms example where solar farms, the opposition used very similar tactics to the data center opposition. They were organizing in Facebook groups. They were packing town halls.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  They were talking about the local impacts and the importance of farmland and the visions for their communities. There were zoning fights, of course. But like you say, with the solar farms, you do have a very clear pro case. You have a faction. You have a group of people, a constituency, people who care about the environment, who want renewable energy, who understand that that's a thing that, yeah, maybe it sucks to have in your backyard, but you can take one for the team because this is important for our planet. You don't really have a pro faction with AI. Same with like the auto plant, right? You have one, you have maybe 7,000 workers in the old GM plant in Janesville, who all have families who really care about them, who see that as a constituency. Everyone drives a car. They see their car as essential.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  I think the fact that it's creating these tangible outputs really, really matter. I don't think that data centers have a compelling pro constituency besides the utility companies and the AI companies, which are already incredibly, incredibly unpopular. And I went in and asked these organizers, do you guys use AI? I do find it useful. This was one of the top questions that my friends in San Francisco wanted me to ask is, are these people like using chat GPT? And they don't even realize that the data centers are how they can use it? And what I found there was a lot of these folks did say, yeah, I've used it to draft an email or make a meme. They're not denying that AI might have any possible utility at all. But they clearly didn't see it as essential

• 22:54Speaker 04

  in the way that cars, energy and housing are essential. They clearly saw it as kind of like a widget, a toy. And maybe there are these risks, maybe there's the job stuff. But fundamentally, they were like, this thing is not that useful. I don't really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations. And so I was talking to, for example, Charles Franklin, who runs Marquette Law Polls in Wisconsin. And he was explaining that usually you see 50/50 polling on issues where you have a strong anti-case and a strong pro case. And the only reason you're kind of seeing this 70/30 bipartisan opposition to data centers, no matter whether you live near a data center or you don't, which means it's not just nimbyism. It's you don't want a data center in anyone's backyard, is because he was like, there is no strong pro argument for it. There is not even a fight that's really going on.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  Nobody wants it, was a phrase I heard over and over.

• 23:41Ezra Klein?

  You have a very influential definition of AI populism, where you call it a worldview in which AI is viewed not only as a normal technology, but as an elite political project to be resisted.

• 23:54Ezra Klein?

  Unpack that for me.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  The phrase that you hear a lot from AI critics is, why is this being shoved down our throats? Or with, you know, chat GPT, it's not that people are saying there is literally no use for chat GPT. It's people are saying, why are you forcing me at my job to use AI to do something worse when I could do it better? And so I think that a lot of the public backlash to AI that has risen over the past six months is not explained by people thinking that the technology has no use at all. It's not explained by them being worried about specific technical properties of LLMs that might lead to rogue AI or misalignment or whatever, which are the sort of safest arguments. It's AI as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires'

• 24:41Speaker 04

  ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent. And I think that's also what I hear echoed in these data center debates. It's not just, uh, it's going to use this much water or that much water. I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers.

• 25:01Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I consider the water, I don't want to say the water issue is fake. What I will say is like, there was a debate

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:08Ezra Klein?

  uh, online a while back about how much water, like a chat GPT query

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:14Ezra Klein?

  consumed. And somebody was like, if you really care about water, are you eating beef?

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:20Ezra Klein?

  As someone who doesn't eat meat, I thought this was a quite good, like, you could really save a lot of water by going vegetarian.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:26Ezra Klein?

  Um, and relatively much, much more than not using chat GPT. And relatively few people in that conversation were giving up meat.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Or giving up YouTube videos.

• 25:34Ezra Klein?

  Or giving up YouTube videos.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Like use more water than a chat GPT query.

• 25:38Ezra Klein?

  Which is to say that I think sometimes people don't like a thing and they're looking for reasons to justify that dislike.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:45Ezra Klein?

  But what's actually happening at the base is they don't like the thing.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:49Ezra Klein?

  And the data centers, like as you're saying, I think, speak to this AI populism question like even more precisely. Because the issue with AI itself is that, I think people's relationship to it is very complicated.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:03Ezra Klein?

  I have myself a very complicated relationship to AI. Like I use it a fair amount. I'm not sure I think it's a good thing for society, the way it is going. I don't want my kids using it. I know they'll be using it. Like maybe it'll make things better, but I really don't know. Like I think that the costs are going to be very, very high for us relationally and economically and, you know. And so I just, I'm very conflicted. But do I want to live next to a data center? Yeah, no.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's totally different.

• 26:31Ezra Klein?

  Like that's easier.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  I mean, one of the most interesting things.

• 26:33Ezra Klein?

  Somebody is just making you do that.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  Yes, of like going to this, um, I, back to back. I went to this Abdul Bernie AOC rally in Lansing, Michigan. And then I went and saw the Celine activists the next day. And I was researching how the Celine Stargate project happened. And it was really interesting to see these echoes of the populist message sort of manifest in this specific project. Like when I'm at this rally, people are talking about the oligarchy. They're talking about corporate billionaires, whether it's big tech or big pharma or DT, the utility companies, paying off politicians in order to, you know, screw the people over. And that's why you need the people to come together and to get money out of politics, to prevent DT from donating to these super PACs and paying off Gretchen Whitmer or whatever.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  And then when I learned how the Celine data center saga played out, what happened was the Celine Township City Council, unlike a lot of city councils, actually voted for one against rezoning their land for the data center. So this was a case where local government said, this is not our vision for our community. It's not worth it to us. And what happened? The data center developers sued Celine Township, a town of like, again, a few thousand people, into saying, wait, no, this is exclusionary zoning. You can't have no industrial use in your entire township. And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant AI data center developer, they just settled. They were just like, fine, give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools. And this fight is not worth it to us. But that to people felt like a profound,

• 28:02Speaker 04

  a profound violation of little d democracy. It felt like the dark money in politics story, which is, you know, you have some very rich companies show up with a bag of money to your politician. They don't tell anybody else what's happening. The politicians aren't allowed to tell their citizens and involve them in the decision-making process. And they themselves work out a deal, a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side, that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality into the world that these tech companies have decided for you. And so I think that the data centers in that sense are a very visceral microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel that AI is showing up in their lives.

• 28:39Ezra Klein?

  I would also maybe even take that a little bit further. I think that the way that not all of the AI companies, and I think Anthropic has largely been a, a good actor here, but many of them have acted, has opened up such a chasm between what they say and then how they act under pressure, that one should be incredibly, incredibly skeptical of them. And what I mean by this is that,

• 29:05Ezra Klein?

  you know, Sam Altman and all these different people, you know, in front of congressional testimony and in interviews will say, you know, it should not just be us making these decisions. There should be a real deep, small d democratic role here in how AI rolls out, in, um, you know, what effects it has on communities and how it is governed. And then when a community or a politician, you know, who is representing a community, tries to say, well, we don't want this data center here, or we want to impose these regulations. We have watched repeatedly these companies turn tremendous amounts of financial artillery

• 29:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:49Ezra Klein?

  against whoever is standing in their way, right? And to, to use this, the expertise and the money and the power they are amassing to kind of short circuit that democratic voice.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. One is like, I think one big gap I noticed between Silicon Valley and the folks in these communities I was talking to is, Silicon Valley does tend to think that money solves all problems, that if you just make the check bigger, everything's going to be okay. And I think people have a sense for, I'm being bribed. This corporation is not offering me a free lunch or whatever. There is going to be something that I'm losing here. And in fact, sometimes the fact that the data center deals were bigger or the amount of political spending was bigger, actually it just makes people more suspicious. Like in the Abdul race, like his number one, like, hit on Haley Stevens is how much money she is getting from APAC, from DTE, from Pharma or whatever. And so one is just that I think we're in a political environment where making the numbers bigger and the amounts of money bigger makes people more suspicious, not less.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  Another one I'll just quickly mention is, I don't even think Anthropic should be left off the hook for things like labor market impacts, right? They are the ones simultaneously warning that we might see a, you know, 50% of white collar jobs lost by 2030. This is really important to us. We're freaking out about it. Dario has written in his essays, we might see an underclass of people of lower intellectual ability. And they are building the agents. They are building the coding agents, the banking agents, the design agents that they know are going to displace jobs, or they believe at least are going to displace jobs. And I think that people feel that hypocrisy as well, which is, if you are so worried about the inequality, why are you building the agents to do it? And when I ask executives and researchers and whoever at Anthropic this question, they don't really have a good answer

• 31:30Speaker 04

  because it is true that their business model is fundamentally premised on the disruption that they say they are causing.

• 32:06Ezra Klein?

  You did a big piece for The Times on the very widespread belief in Silicon Valley that they will create this underclass.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:14Ezra Klein?

  What does the underclass mean to them?

• 32:16Speaker 04

  The idea of a permanent underclass caused by AI is basically a world where any job a person can do, either AI or a robot can do for them, which means that workers lose all the economic leverage they have and capital owners, people with money, can simply pay machine labor to do all the work instead of paying workers. What that means is anyone who earned their living by working is no longer able to do that. You end up with a world of runaway inequality where the rich get richer and the working class gets poor. Maybe they get some welfare checks, but fundamentally, it's a loss of economic mobility in a society. And when I ask folks in Silicon Valley, do you think by default AI is going to increase or decrease inequality?

• 32:58Speaker 04

  I have not yet heard anyone say it will decrease inequality or keep it the same. They might say the floor will get really high. They might say AI will bring the cost of consumer goods down and so people's lives are going to get cheaper and, you know, everyone will be super healthy, so it's okay. But I have not heard a single person in the tech industry tell me that they believe that AI is going to decrease inequality. And in fact, many people are very worried that instead, most workers will lose their leverage and be on a kind of permanent welfare in the far off future.

• 33:26Ezra Klein?

  I'm pretty skeptical of this vision, although I don't rule it out, right? It might happen, although I just don't think AI is going to be quite as revolutionary as a lot of these people think and will not diffuse into the real world as easily. But, you know, the thing you're going to need to adjust to any major technological change is time.

• 33:46Ezra Klein?

  And then also, it's like, the AI industry is in like an all out war to make sure we have as little time for adjustment as possible.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look at their job postings.

• 33:53Ezra Klein?

  And I just find it hard to like, unnot that.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  How many enterprise salespeople are OpenAI and Anthropic hiring in order to convince companies that they can replace their workforce, or maybe not replace, but expand their workforce with agents instead of humans, right? They are having these sales conversations, trying to persuade people of these questions. I don't think that a permanent underclass is the likeliest outcome economically that we're going to get. I think that AI is actually just really jagged and human jobs are super complex and super hard to automate. And most of the folks who are predicting economic apocalypse haven't actually worked enough real jobs to know how complicated and how multifaceted most jobs really are. But I definitely agree on the speed point. I think that, like Alex DeMoss, economist, has made this point very well.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  One thing I think a lot about are people say, well, humans can adjust, humans can reskill, they can retrain, they can just do the new jobs that we're going to develop instead. But you look at things like software engineering where people will often say now, senior software engineers are doing great, they love Claude Code, junior software engineers have been mostly replaced and you see hiring and job postings are down in that sector. Well, do we think that a human software engineer is going to rescale or upscale themselves faster than the next model is going to get better at software engineering? That's the question that I really wonder about is if AI progress outpaces humans' ability to rescale, retrain, upscale, adapt, then I'm not really sure what there is going to be left.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  There'll be some jobs left, but it's going to be a really, really painful adjustment.

• 35:26Ezra Klein?

  I have had so many people at the top of these companies, right? The very tippy top, tell me they wish all this would slow down.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:37Ezra Klein?

  I'm sure you have had them say this to you, right? But in this world where, in their unguarded moments, they will say they wish all this was going slower, well, one way to slow AI down is to constrict the number of data centers you can build.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:56Ezra Klein?

  Just like you've done, you know, as good reporting as anybody on just how conflicted people even working for these companies seem to be about what they are building. And yet, they're in this competitive race to build it as quickly as possible. And so it makes them a pretty unconvincing pro faction.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely, yeah.

• 36:15Ezra Klein?

  We're building the thing we're telling you to be afraid of and we need to build it as fast as possible, even though we sort of admit that it would be better if the whole thing was slowed down.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  It's very confusing.

• 36:24Ezra Klein?

  It's a weird argument.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so confusing. I remember when I sat down with Abdul, also the Michigan Senate candidate, he cited Dario's 50% white collar job loss stat probably like five times in the 30 minute conversation. It's like, he was like, they're saying that there's going to be recursive self-improvement and it might kill us all. Like, yeah, I get why you would not want to make this thing go faster. This is true for data centers, but it's true for any other way that you might slow AI down, which is that everyone only wants to be slowed down if they can guarantee that the other companies, that the Chinese labs are going to slow down with them. So long as that's not true, they're going to keep racing. And I think for that reason, yeah, I mean, the thing that I hear when I talk to people

• 37:06Speaker 04

  at the companies, data center executives about the build out is, how much money do we need to give these cities to let us build a data center? Tell us how to bribe them better. Tell us what we can do. And so when I talk to them about the build out, I'm not hearing any sort of personal moral reckoning with slowing AI down. I'm hearing, how do I make the bribes bigger? How big do they need to be?

• 37:25Ezra Klein?

  So then how do you reconcile what many of these executives, many of these AI company workers are telling you about their fears of creating an underclass, about their fears of losing control? I mean, we just saw the situation where OpenAI's model was breaking out of a sandbox in order to sort of cheat on its evaluation, right? So the AI safety people are very worried, right? The safety teams in here clearly don't have full control or even understanding of what they're building. How do you reconcile, if you reconcile, the way the AI companies talk when they are giving voice to their fears, or the people at them talk when they're giving voice to their fears?

• 38:06Ezra Klein?

  And their, like, pretty profound hostility to anything that would slow down how fast we are building this thing, whose consequences they freely admit they cannot predict?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's fascinating because just on a very personal level, when I talk to people at these companies, I just think like, man, if I thought this thing might have a 10% chance of killing us all or taking everybody's job, I wouldn't work on it.

• 38:32Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I would not build that.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  I personally could not morally justify taking that chance. And when I talk to people who are not in the San Francisco AI world, they feel like I do. They're just like, why would you do it? And I think there are basically three rough buckets of rationales that I hear from people or that I hear between the lines from people. One is this sort of sense of techno determinism. It's, superintelligence is going to be built inevitably. There is no way it's not going to happen. If it happens, I want to be part of it. I want to make my money from it. I want to maybe make it happen in the least bad way. I think that's a super common answer.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Another is, this technology might kill us all, but it also might be really amazing. It might produce super abundance for everybody. We might be immortal. It might double everyone's lifespans, cure all diseases, bring the cost of every consumer good, housing, energy, whatever, to near zero, and that would be utopia. And so I think all the time to that anecdote that I think SBF said on a podcast where it's...

• 39:40Ezra Klein?

  Sam Bankman Fried.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, Sam Bankman Fried said on a podcast where it was like, if you could flip a coin and it was 51% odds, you would double the total amount of like human welfare and 49% chance everyone dies, would you flip the coin? He says yes.

• 39:52Speaker 05

  And again, I feel compelled to say like, have you guys hear of like, you know, how do you really know that's what's happening? Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Put that aside, take the hypothetical, the pure hypothetical. Yeah, yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  I think this is a hyperbolic example, but I think it's not actually that far off from what a lot of the people building superintelligence believe too, that they are basically willing to flip the coin. Maybe we all die, but maybe we're all immortal and that expected value wise cancels things out. And then the final category is just, I think, folks who are so fascinated by the technical endeavor of whether we can build this thing and how to do it, that they just aren't super worried about the consequences or what else might happen. So people have all sorts of self-justifying narratives as to why it's worth it. Some I think are better than others.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  But it makes sense to me why the public is not particularly sympathetic to any of these.

• 40:46Ezra Klein?

  I mean, that middle narrative, I heard Sam Bankman Fried say that, I think it was on Tyler Cowen's podcast. And it's like, oh, that's like, that's a psychopath, right? To actually believe that you would have to be a psychopath, you would have to have a very, very, very low value on, I think, human life.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 41:03Ezra Klein?

  Right? Imagine being the person who flips that coin and it comes up wrong.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Oh, Jesus, yeah.

• 41:08Ezra Klein?

  Like, I'm a parent. Like, the idea that you would do something that's like 5149 on like, your kid is doubly happy or your kid is gone, like, you would never, you don't even want to say that out loud.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  Of course. I think that's how almost everybody thinks about it. And again, I think 5149 is obviously the most egregious example you could think of. And so SBF is very unsympathetic. But when I think about the superintelligence bet, a lot of people will characterize it as a 9010 bet, as an 8020 bet. And this question of how much is an acceptable amount of either extinction risk or total disempowerment risk, you know, I think people have very different risk appetites. And Silicon Valley is a place that has always prized their high risk appetite. I think that makes a lot more sense when you're talking about maybe yourself or your company, full of people who have opted into taking a very high risk endeavor. I think that's extremely different, obviously, when you're talking about the rest of the world. And one thing with the data center debates that I'd always hear is like, you know, I

• 42:06Speaker 04

  get that these people are making this crazy bet on this technology they think is going to change the world, but why do they have to do it in our backyard? Why is Mark Zuckerberg not building a data center in his backyard? And so this question of, yeah, you guys are going to create like, these very tangible impacts and to their real harms on specific communities that are not the communities benefiting from this technology. At least they don't see the benefits yet. They don't see the cancer cures. They don't see themselves getting these million dollar, $10 million salaries that the AI researchers are getting. It feels like, I think it feels to a lot of these folks, like they are pawns in some tech billionaires' game and they do not like to feel that way.

• 42:45Ezra Klein?

  Why aren't they building it in their own backyard? That's why don't you see a bunch of data centers in, you know, Northern California?

• 42:51Speaker 04

  I don't think I need to tell you why it's so hard to build in Northern California.

• 42:55Ezra Klein?

  But I both I both think that's true, that it's hard to build in Northern California. But I also think there's like a truth to the other thing being said, they don't want them there.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  No.

• 43:03Ezra Klein?

  Right? I mean, the land is expensive. It would be very hard, like inexpensive to build a data center and like the places where we're talking about. But it also gets at a core truth, which is people don't actually want data centers around them. It is a cost. It is a concentrated cost for a diffuse benefit, like if you believe in the benefit.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:21Ezra Klein?

  So I think that's part of it. I want to go back to the first bucket you were talking about, which is like the race dynamics.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:27Ezra Klein?

  So at the most generous, the thing that I've heard repeatedly is sort of what you're describing, which is it would be better if this were going slower. But I can't control that because I, whether I'm at, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI or Google or Meta, you know, if we slow down, it just is our less ethical competitors over there who speed up. And even if you put down legislation slowing down all of America, then it's China.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:00Ezra Klein?

  You know, the CCP, which is going to to win the race. I guess one question is, do you buy this central metaphor of a race that has a like a ticker tape line where at some point somebody passes it and then they have the recursive superintelligence and like the race is over? Or do you see this more as like most technologies, like a kind of like a linear set of gains? I mean, can be fast, can be slow, but that doesn't have that somebody is going to win dynamic?

• 44:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I find this really confusing. One of the first things that I did when I started reporting more deeply on AI was try to figure out what AGI meant, because a lot of the way that this race has been characterized is who will build AGI first?

• 44:50Ezra Klein?

  Artificial general intelligence.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  Artificial general intelligence first. Thing, first thing I found, no one agrees on what that means. AGI means everything from techno AI that can build itself to AI that can do all human jobs to AI that produces whatever number of economic value. And so everyone has these different milestones for what constitutes AGI to them. What that also means is that the race has different finish lines and moving finish lines. And I think that like you see the way that these models perform differently on benchmarks. They are extremely jagged. They can be super good at math and they can be super bad at poker at the same time. They can be, yeah, amazing at cracking cybersecurity problems, but not able to build anything in the physical world.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  And because of that, I don't think that technology is A as general as people suggest it is. I also think that means that it is much harder to define a finish line to the race. And my sense is that the race, because you cannot adjudicate it, everyone will always feel that they are falling behind on some dimension. I mean, to then make the case for that these AI companies are making is they do believe in this recursive self-improvement. They think that, you know, OpenAI, Google, DeepMind and Anthropic are all extremely focused specifically on the question of can we build AI that builds itself? Can we build an AI that can train the next generation model completely from scratch on its own?

• 46:14Speaker 04

  And in that sense, you get an exponential pace of improvement for whoever can hit that recursive self-improvement curve first. And they think that this might lead to that company pulling ahead. Right now, folks think that it's Anthropic, which has the best coding models, meaning they can code faster, meaning that their next models are even better. I can see where that argument is, but I'm not sure when we look at, you know, the latest Anthropic models versus the latest OpenAI models versus the latest, you know, Chinese open weights models, that we see a company pulling ahead that decisively in that way, especially when every single company in lab is using the same recursive self-improvement strategy.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  And so basically, I don't know that the race has a finish line, and that's what worries me about it continuing.

• 47:05Ezra Klein?

  The reason I want to focus in on this race metaphor for a minute is I've come to think it is really one of the central dividing lines in how you think about different kinds of AI policy.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 47:17Ezra Klein?

  Whether you think that we are in a race with China to get to the point where one side or the other is going to pull like endlessly and decisively ahead because they hit that, you know, recursive self-improving level. Well, then that means what you do in the next one to three years is incredibly, incredibly definitionally important.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 47:40Ezra Klein?

  But if you don't believe that, if you believe something more like, yes, this is a powerful technology, it's a powerful technology that might have a lot of downsides, might come with a lot of social instability, its effect on a society may not be good, then let's run faster to the bad place is not nearly as compelling an argument. And all of a sudden, the idea that we should have policy in place that slows things down for more voice, for more consideration, it's not crazy. And I guess one place this goes is that I have begun to notice like a really interesting convergence between the SFAI safety people in a way and like the AI populace, like a

• 48:23Ezra Klein?

  Bernie Sanders or in a different way, and I'll say, who are getting to not that different places, but through very, very different mechanisms, right? They're like the AI safety people who actually believe we are in a race, but they believe that winning that race might bring the end of humanity.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:42Ezra Klein?

  And so like they don't, they don't want to move that fast, right? If we begin to slow down, we'd have more credibility for negotiating with China and like trying to come up with like international treaties and all the rest of it. You know, and then you have like the kind of more AI populist side, who just like doesn't want to give all these tech billionaires all this power, who doesn't believe this technology will be good for people. And they're starting to come up with like, maybe not the policies AI safety people would, but you know, data center moratoriums and things like that. And so you have this sort of slightly strange, like you would not have considered this coalition.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  It's super interesting. I mean, you literally have Ron DeSantis doing AI roundtables with Max Tegmark, who's been one of the leading advocates of pausing and slowing down AI and MIT professor. And you have Bernie Sanders doing viral videos with Eliezer Yudkowsky, the guy who's telling us that AI is probably going to kill us all if we build it. I was talking-

• 49:36Ezra Klein?

  Which is both in lines, it doesn't and does kind of makes it, you know what I mean?

• 49:39Speaker 04

  Totally. I've been spending some time in DC this year to talk to some of these AI populists, some from the social conservative right, others from, say, the labor left. And this Bannon guy I was talking to told me, he's like, you know, like, I wouldn't send my kids over to a play day at the polycule, but I can do coalitions. And so I think it's been one of the most interesting political stories going on right now is the sort of strange bedfellows that have emerged. I mean, even with the data center stuff, I was talking to an activist and they were saying these were liberal women who had gotten into politics after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. They said that data centers were the first thing that got them to talk productively with their Trump voting neighbors about politics, the first thing in like 10 years almost, which is fascinating to me. And in this sense, they felt a really strong sense almost of

• 50:22Speaker 04

  political agency that almost came out of this fight. So I, yeah, I think one of the big questions that folks in AI safety, for example, are thinking about is, do we want to build these alliances with the rising left and right populist waves in American culture in order to slow AI down? Maybe it's okay that we have different reasons and different theories for why AI is so dangerous. For one person is big model bad. For another person, it's big billionaires bad, big tech bad. And those folks are sort of linking arms in a lot of ways against the AI accelerationists and sort of the folks pushing the race faster.

• 51:00Ezra Klein?

  So I think listening to this, we've been sort of living in the data center moratorium side of the politics. But what's the other side of it? What are the problems with just saying, okay, fine, like, let's not build any more data centers?

• 51:15Speaker 04

  One, like, this is not actually the way that you would successfully slow down AI if that's what you really wanted. One, if you, if one locality or one state imposes a moratorium, AI companies are very, very happy to go to other states or other countries. They are already flooding into Texas, for example, because it's had such a pro data center environment. People are looking at Louisiana, the Dakotas, Australia, space, of course, is a current big interest of Elon Musk's because people think that maybe not now, but in five years, we can just put all the data centers in space and solve the political problems that way. So one is, I'm not really sure that this would- Stop AI progress that much, it would just shift the data centers to other places that do welcome them.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  The second thing is, I actually do think that there are ways for these deals to be good. Not every community should want a data center. I think that many of them may discuss it and say, this isn't what we want. We don't need the tax revenue that bad. But in a lot of the cases with these sites that I visited, like, you know, in the old GM site in Janesville, the Veridian Partners, the data center developer, was going to clean that brownfield up. They were the only ones willing to do so. I talked to a real estate broker who had tried to sell that site for five years and he couldn't do it because not a single other commercial buyer wanted to clean up all of this hazardous waste. Only the data centers were willing to do that. Or with Mount Pleasanton, the Foxconn site, right?

• 52:41Speaker 04

  They had already cleared all this land, they had built all this infrastructure. Putting a data center there was a net improvement for the community, in my opinion, personally, from an economic perspective, from the perspective of, there is nothing going on there anyway. So I think that there are ways to do these deals right. There is enough money in this industry that a lot of communities will decide it is economically beneficial for them to bring in these jobs and bring in this investment. But I think that the way that the data center deals have been done nearly guarantee the amount of public backlash that there's been. And the thing that will probably fix it, I suspect, is probably either like a state level streamlining, where someone does the research, probably at the state level, maybe at the federal level, to figure out, what is the fair way to do these deals?

• 53:24Speaker 04

  How do we ensure the communities get the most transparency, the most benefit out of data center deals when they happen? So it's not case by case, and it's not so asymmetric with a town of 12,000 negotiating with an open AI or whatever.

• 53:35Ezra Klein?

  I would add two other things to that, that I'd be curious to hear your take on. So one, you mentioned data centers moving towards other localities. And those localities are not randomly selected. They're localities that are going to impose fewer conditions. So maybe that is fewer environmental conditions. But, you know, in the case of maybe a UAE or some of the Gulf states that are interested here, you know, you're looking at more authoritarian countries, right? So I've heard a lot of people worry about that, or Elon Musk in space. So in a sense, if you make it so the data centers cannot go into places where there is more democratic control, you might end up with less overall democratic control. The other thing, and I do think this is significant, is that there is right now more demand for

• 54:20Ezra Klein?

  compute than there is compute.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:22Ezra Klein?

  You know, people talk a lot about a bubble, but we do not look to have excess AI supply at the moment. And if demand keeps rising because, you know, the coding agents get better and all the rest of the things we know that are happening, but you are constricting the supply of compute, then you end up with more inequality and who can afford it? So, you know, Goldman Sachs, a JP Morgan, right? You know, a company with a lot of money to buy compute is going to have a lot of it. And then, you know, ordinary users, small businesses, et cetera. If you believe AI is important and powerful, and I believe it is important and powerful, then you have a problem where you have created much more stratification and who can afford it. How do you think about those dimensions of it?

• 55:07Speaker 04

  I think with where you build the data centers, a lot of folks are starting to look at building AI infrastructure as a form of geopolitical leverage, right? And so some countries, like places like Australia, Canada, countries in Europe are thinking, actually, maybe the way for us to get a slice of frontier AI, for us to negotiate with the countries where the best AI is being developed, like the US, in cases like cybersecurity access, is to say, you know, we'll build your data centers here, we'll actually welcome you in, and in return, maybe you guarantee us access to the frontier models. So I think that one is that we should look at AI infrastructure as a point of leverage that both states and countries have.

• 55:51Speaker 04

  And as you mentioned, if local moratoriums in the US, if domestic moratoriums or something like that, lead to giving that leverage and negotiating power to authoritarian states, that's probably something the US should be really worried about. On the other hand, there are folks like Anton Light, Carnegie has done work on this, where it's, can we give our allies, can we give our democratic allies negotiating leverage through them building out compute? The second thing that you mentioned about pricing is interesting because I do think one of the big macro trends in AI right now is the closing of the frontier. It's the fact that the very best models, like Mythos from Anthropic, are not being open to everybody.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  That is both a safety decision, as in, we don't want to give really powerful cyber weapons and bioweapons to a bunch of bad actors or just unknown actors. It is also a pricing question of, the best models are really, really expensive to run, they don't have enough compute to run them, and so we're going to have to charge a lot of money or only give it to the biggest corporations. And I think that's a reason that startups are worried, that countries outside of the US are worried, that normal people are worried. Maybe we get superintelligence and it can achieve all of these amazing things, but I'm not going to get it. Maybe my boss is going to get the superintelligence and they're going to automate my job as a worker, as a consumer, I'm not going to be able to do the same thing.

• 57:18Speaker 04

  So I think it's also a really good point that if we don't continue the compute build out, we do see a world where it is the folks with existing capital and access, probably big corporations in the US and the US government, that are going to have access to frontier AI and all the benefits that it confers.

• 58:05Ezra Klein?

  You were in China for a trip reporting on AI. Was there much political AI backlash and ferment there from what you could see?

• 58:14Speaker 04

  I was super interested in this question on this trip because I was finishing my Times piece on the permanent underclass while in China. And so I was basically asking everyone I met there, whether it was engineers at the labs or just my family members who are sort of normal, middle-class people in Shanghai, are people worried about AI and jobs? Are people worried about AI and social instability? I think the answer is not as much. I caveat this, of course, with the fact that the information environment in China is obviously suppressed. You can't dissent in public on social media nearly as much as you can in the US. You don't have good polling. So it's kind of hard to understand the actual level of social discontent there is in China. But I would say that for the most part, people were not as terrified of AI as they are in the US. There's a few explanations for this.

• 58:57Speaker 04

  Some people say that China is more techno-optimistic than the US is. I don't love this explanation, mostly because the thing that I heard was not exactly optimism. It was not exactly, yeah, we're going to get the cancer cures and the superabundance. It was something a lot closer to technology is a force that cannot be stopped. Actually, in some ways, reminded me more of some of these Silicon Valley beliefs, that the future is predetermined, that when the state decides that something like AI is a national priority, that is going to march forward. And as an individual, there's not much you can do to resist, especially in a one-party state, in an authoritarian society, there is no culture of resistance, really. And so rather than thinking about, how do I prevent AI in my workplace or in the world? That's not really a thing that a lot of people are trying to think about.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  It's, how can I use AI to make sure I don't fall behind? In an environment that already has crazy levels of white-collar competition and white-collar unemployment, if you're not upskilling yourself with, you know, open claw or whatever, there's a million people in line behind you who are going to get on the bus. At the same time, I think that the Chinese state takes a pretty different approach to the US when it comes to AI regulation and also to technology regulation in general. And so China has passed laws sort of banning a lot of kinds of companion chatbots because they're worried about relationships, they're worried about fertility rates, they're worried about addiction. China has passed, made court rulings that say that AI replaced this worker's job, AI can do this worker's job, is not a good enough reason to lay off a worker.

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  You have regulations that require all AI-generated images to be labeled, and you'll see the "made with AI" sort of language on all of the AI-made ads in China. And so there's also a sense that some people, some Chinese have, that their government is more likely to look out for sort of the social downsides and the labor downsides relative to the US government, which has thus far been pretty laissez-faire, especially at the national level, right? And that gives some people a bit of solace as well.

• 1:00:53Ezra Klein?

  There's been some reporting that China and Russia are pushing sort of anti-data center memes and, you know, social media bots. It's hard for me to tell what scale that is, but it has been very much picked up on by, like, people like Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank guy, whose, you know, big data center project has faced a lot of backlash. Do you buy the the sort of growing view among like, at least some tech elite that the data center backlash is like a Chinese psyop?

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  I think this is ridiculous, to be honest. I mean, so I read the OpenAI report that was saying like, this is all a CCP plot and like, it pastes in the accounts and the tweets that are doing the psyop. These tweets have like, no likes on them. They have two views per tweet. So I'm not doubting that like, I'm sure some clever CCP propaganda person has attempted to inflame the anti-data center sentiment. I have not seen evidence that any of this is working. I think it feels very organic. I think I also tend to be personally a little suspicious when you just cast all your political opponents as being misinformed. I think there's a way in which people use foreign influence to avoid thinking about the fact that there are people that they live with in society who do not agree with their vision of the

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  world. And when I talk to these, uh, data center activists, for example, they are actually much less TikTok adult and misinformed than I think people like to caricature. A lot of them understand sort of the basic facts of what's the difference between an AI data center and the old kind of data center? How much, what's the difference between a closed loop system and an open loop system? Most of these people are not just misinformed, they have just personally decided, I'm not that interested in having a data center in my community, even if it pays some property taxes.

• 1:02:33Ezra Klein?

  So you talk to people in the AI companies and sort of talk to them about this backlash? I know they're very worried about this, right? I've talked to them about this. What are they learning from it?

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  I do think that this year in 2026, I've AI executives, AI researchers have started to take the public backlash a lot more seriously than they have in the past. Um, I've heard executives ask, can we do better marketing? I don't understand why it is that Waymos are so unpopular. Um, I've heard executives ask, what do you think are the deals that we should be making? Do you think we should just be mailing checks to every house that lives near a data center project? Will that fix things? Um, like, tell us how to make a better deal. Do we need to cut people's electricity prices in half? Would that work? Unfortunately, the word bribe gets used a lot more than I am personally comfortable with. I think

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  that when you are framing the thing you're doing, even jokingly, as bribing communities into putting a data center there, I don't think you're starting off on the right foot. I think that people can feel when they are being bribed. I've heard these people say, these companies are bribing us. Um, so there's a little bit of examination. The thing that I don't think is being examined as much as I want it to be, though, is are we building a technology? Are we building a product that is helping people?

• 1:03:56Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, the version of this I have heard is, we have a marketing problem. Maybe we should stop saying aloud so often

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:04:04Ezra Klein?

  that our technology might take everybody's job and has a 10% chance of upending or destroying humanity altogether?

• 1:04:16Ezra Klein?

  What has not been clear to me, even as I begin to like, maybe move away from that messaging a little bit, is whether or not they no longer believe that. Again, I am, my personal view is like, I don't think it's going to take everybody's job. But to the extent they do, or at least they take that very, very seriously, it's like, I keep hearing them say that we have a marketing problem. And I keep saying, when I talk to them about this, that if you believe the things you have been saying, and in fact, the things you have told me personally, you don't have a marketing problem.

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Ezra Klein?

  You have a problematic technology.

• 1:04:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:04:49Ezra Klein?

  Like you have a product problem.

• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:04:51Ezra Klein?

  Because people are not going to want that future.

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think I would make some distinctions between, of course, different companies, different executives, right? Like, one thing that's like, very interesting to me, thinking about the comms in Silicon Valley, is that for a very long time, these companies were only marketing to potential recruits and potential investors, basically. They were trying to win the vibes on AI Twitter in San Francisco. And I kind of feel like they never realized everyone else could hear them, right? And so now they're trying to take it back. But like, my sense is that Sam Altman, for a long time, part of the reason he was talking about like, oh, shifting the balance of power from labor to capital and like, rogue AI and whatever, was also because he was winning points among people who he wanted to work at OpenAI. And he had to communicate that he was as AGI-pilled as them, he was

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  as worried about the same safety things as them. And now that his interest is more in political goodwill and IPO-ing and things like that, he sort of changed his tune. Um, I think that, yeah, I, I, I'm, I'm not sure to what extent every AI industry actor has always believed the things that they've warned about.

• 1:05:55Ezra Klein?

  I think people can believe things that they don't feel, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of people in the AI industry are in a culture and inside arguments where

• 1:06:09Ezra Klein?

  this set of outcomes feels very real, right? Uh, or, or looks very real. And so I think they believe it. I think when they make these arguments, I don't think they're just doing it for, you know, publicity points. In fact, I think it's the opposite. I think when they're now trying to move away from some of these arguments, I think it's actually much more of like a cynical marketing ploy.

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Ezra Klein?

  But I think they often believe these things without actually, like, in their bones, feeling it, um, which is sort of why they act relatively heedlessly.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Ezra Klein?

  Or at least like, on the set of things they believe, like, this speculative notional set of beliefs about what might happen is way less close to their core.

• 1:06:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Ezra Klein?

  Than their belief that if they don't build this data center, or get this next model out, like, their competitors or China or somebody

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Ezra Klein?

  is like, going to get in front of them. And they're much more motivated by, by, by the push forward.

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think the technological determinism is just such a big part of it. I think that if I'm trying to think about how my friends in the AI industry would react to this conversation, that's the thing that they would say that we are not focusing on enough, is they are so sure that there is no way that AGI or superintelligence or whatever it is, does not get built, and it is only a question of who builds it. I think that fundamental sort of underlying belief is what justifies everything else, is we have to be the ones to do it. Us pulling back, us stopping, is not going to prevent any of the bad stuff, right?

• 1:07:27Ezra Klein?

  I, I agree with that. And I think that's why the China card in this has been such like, a destructive

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Ezra Klein?

  part of the argument. I'm not even sure it's totally untrue. Like, I, I am completely willing to believe that China and America are in a race for a economically and geopolitically important technology, even if you don't buy like recursive superintelligence. Um, but the way that has then been used to not say, well, we should enter into international negotiations or something, but instead just like, we cannot slow down whatsoever, no matter what else we worry about or, or believe, I think has been, it is, it is acted as a kind of blackmail. And the thing is that it's not bought by enough people

• 1:08:07Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:08:08Ezra Klein?

  outside of the industry. But I think the phase of the politics we're now in is out of their control. And it is just not going to be the case that they have control over the AI narrative, like, next year that they had two years ago. And yeah, I don't really think they know what to, what to do in that space. And so now it's like, either going to have to start benefiting

• 1:08:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Ezra Klein?

  people, right? You, some of these, like, if people began seeing like, drug cures come out, right? All these things we've actually been promised.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:40Ezra Klein?

  And you could say, like, we're beginning to see the beginning of like, mathematical conjectures, like, that's been pretty cool. But we're not really seeing the gains. And if you start getting the losses before the gains

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Ezra Klein?

  right? You start getting the job loss, for instance, before the promised, you know, superabundance, politically, that's not going to be an equilibrium you can protect.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  That's one of the things I'm worried about, is I do think that we are pretty likely to see, we are seeing a lot of the social instability before we get the cancer cures, right? And so, or even with the math stuff, it's like, I think that one thing I notice more and more now is this deep cultural and values gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of America, the rest of the world. I'm not saying that Silicon Valley is wrong, that it's cool to like, disprove the Jacobean conjecture, right? Like, um, it is cool. But like, when you ask a lot of people in the tech industry what their utopia looks like, they'll say things like, we have UBI, so no one has to work anymore, we're all immortal, and we've discovered all of math and physics. And if you do the polling on UBI and mortality, neither are especially popular with the American public. I think that most

• 1:09:43Ezra Klein?

  We polled immortality, isn't that funny?

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  I mean, it's been polled, you can look it up. Um, if you ask people what, like, they want AI to do for them, it's not necessarily having, you know, Karen's towel in your pocket. It's not disproving math, right? Like, they want things to be cheaper, they want to be healthier, they want to not do crappy work, so they have more time for the stuff they like. But I think it is genuinely true that the stuff that is really cool, and also that is oftentimes technically easier to solve, like math, um, is not what most people want from this technology. Um, and I think it's also true that it's just literally technically harder to cure cancer than it is, it turns out, to prove math theorems. And the other

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  thing that I hear from the public when I talk about the cancer cures is, yeah, but are they going to just use it for themselves? Is Peter Thiel or whoever just gonna buy himself immortality? Am I going to be able to afford immortality?

• 1:10:39Ezra Klein?

  My view for a very long time has been that a lot of people in these companies overrate how much of the bottleneck in scientific and human progress is raw intelligence.

• 1:10:50Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:10:51Ezra Klein?

  And just, I mean, this is a point of abundance, it's just, but the point of covering anything, anywhere, the world is full of friction.

• 1:10:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, you want to do drug discovery, and I think we should actually do a lot to make drug discovery easier, make drug testing easier, right? Like, I've said this many times before, I would like to see us prepare, like, drug development for a world where AI is spitting out way more promising molecular candidates. But that's still a world where you need enough monkeys to test things on.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:11:22Ezra Klein?

  Humans to test things on, rats to test things on, right? And you still need to do all the safety data. And just the amount of the world that is slowed down by, we don't have any good ideas, like, we are out of ideas versus it is hard to organize things amidst humans, you know, amidst, you know, with raw materials, like, in bureaucracies, in organizations, you get that, like, Intelligence is important, but it is not everything. And I think anybody who's been in organizations knows it's actually less than you think it is.

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, again, I think of a, you know, a lot of these people have been AI researchers for their entire careers, maybe before that they were physics PhDs or they were doing quant trading, which are all these kinds of jobs that are fairly, they're IC jobs, they're individual contributors, where you're not necessarily working in big teams, there's not a lot of politicking and relational work, where all of the relevant context lives inside a single code base. And so for AI to sort of understand what's going on and kind of explore all this context that's already been written down, I'm not saying there's no tacit knowledge, but a lot more of the context is made explicit. And these are also places where simply applying more thinking and more intelligence, just as an individual, like as a person, a remote worker in a closet or whatever, might actually find the more efficient algorithm, right?

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  Like, you don't actually need to politic your way to a better algorithm. You don't need to do stuff in the physical world to get that. And so I think a lot of people at these companies don't really realize how hard that is. I mean, it's funny because people will say things like, yeah, there's like electricity costs and energy costs to AI, but like AI will maybe solve the climate. And I ask how, and to be clear, I think there are a lot of ways that AI can improve, you know, climate science research, help.

• 1:13:06Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, building efficiency.

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. But like, at the same time, you ask people and it's just like, oh, I don't know, it's just gonna do it, right? Or it's like, oh, how is AI gonna improve robotics? Like, I don't know, AI will figure it out. You kind of do have this, I find it lazy, actually. Like, one of the things that annoys me about this particular approach is, it's not that I don't think that AI can contribute to all of these problems, I think it definitely can, but what I often hear is a kind of laziness about how it's going to do that. And it feels like a Deus ex machina of, it's super smart, just figure it out.

• 1:13:38Ezra Klein?

  I used to say that, this was back when Silicon Valley was a more optimistic place than it has been in recent years, but that the difference between the culture of DC, where I lived for a long time, and Silicon Valley, was that in Silicon Valley, people's worldview is formed by seeing impossible problems prove possible to solve. And in DC, people's worldview is formed by seeing possible problems prove impossible to solve. And I think that is now going to collapse for the AI industry into one worldview, because, you know, these are people who, like, give them their due, they've invented artificial intelligence, like, they actually did it. You know, this is amazing, like, I cannot believe how good some of these systems are. I'm like shocked to be living through this.

• 1:14:24Ezra Klein?

  They were able to do that, that seemed impossible, proved possible, and now they're gonna, now they're finding it's like impossible to build a data center.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Ezra Klein?

  And like, that's what doing other kinds of things in the world teaches you.

• 1:14:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:14:37Ezra Klein?

  That there are a lot of problems that are not possible to solve, not because like, you cannot come up with the idea for them, but because you are dealing with like the messy realities of societies, of politics, of values, of, you know, logistics. And it'll demand a kind of, it'll impose a kind of realism, I think, on the issues that it has not always had.

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was trying to think about what the difference was between how I would describe Silicon Valley and San Francisco culture a year ago, let's say, early 2025 versus now. And I think the number one thing is that Silicon Valley has really woken up to politics. You know, in January 2025, Silicon Valley was feeling very triumphant about Doge, about Elon Musk, about David Sacks and Shroom and the White House, they kind of felt like they were all in control. And actually, if you just build these genius technologies and you get super rich and you have good ideas, you'll just, you know, get the political power to enact your vision. And a year and a half later, a lot of those folks are out of the White House, they failed at reducing the national debt and achieving all these other goals that they thought they could just AI their way into solving.

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  Anthropic, for example, is, has had a lot of problems in its dealings with the Trump administration, fundamentally very political and very relational problems. Dario's problem in dealing with the White House was not, I think, that he didn't have good arguments or that he's not very smart or not saying logical things. I think that anyone from Anthropic will admit that these are largely relational problems. And so there's a way where I think democracy and politics is a lot more powerful than these very rich and very smart tech people realize. And there's some optimism to that, I think, in looking at it and saying, it's actually really hard to buy an election, it's actually really hard to buy out the whole White House at once.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  But it's an interesting moment, I think, for the tech industry to be realizing how important politics really is and how difficult it is.

• 1:16:36Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  Ooh, so I think the first one is really relevant to this conversation, which is Benjamin Labatut's The Maniac, which includes a sort of lightly fictionalized biography of John von Neumann, The Story of AlphaGo. I think it's very much a sort of halfway novel, halfway nonfiction book about how intelligence is incredibly awe-inspiring and something worth respecting and at the same time can lead people to some very dark realities. My second book is The Technology Trap from Carl Benedict Frey, which I think is very much about how people's attitudes towards technology and automation depend on to what

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  extent the benefits, the economic growth is shared, to what extent they feel like they're getting a piece of the pie. It goes through a lot of history, much more than just the Industrial Revolution. And so that's shaped a lot of my thinking on some of the economic questions and the populist questions. And then finally, Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering, because I do think that the relational stuff is going to become a lot more important, it always was, and I do think that book has helped me become a better host.

• 1:17:49Ezra Klein?

  She would be so happy to hear that. People should go check out our conversation with Priya Parker. Jasmine Sun, thank you so much.

• 1:17:55Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me, this was fun.