cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54061344
https://archive.ph/2026.11.05-224738/https://www.ft.com/content/32fd4450-5880-437d-9bd9-df13289ada24
The US midterm elections — in which voters elected anti-data centre governors in Texas, Georgia and Ohio and passed 38 local votes in favour of restrictions on their development — have forced the tech industry to reflect on its failure to connect with the public.
“The reason is not that people are Luddites . . . it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid. It has become a political symbol,” said Vik Bajaj, co-chief executive of the Jeff Bezos-backed AI start-up Prometheus.
. . . “As a profession, we have spent two years pretty dangerously telling people that AI will change the future of work for the worse — that they will be out of jobs, that their children will be out of jobs, their grandchildren will live in a world that’s unrecognisable. And then for the last year or so, we’ve also been flirting with the idea that it’s an existential crisis.”
“I think this election was a big wake-up call . . . to take a pause and think about what’s happening and approach this in a way that’s maybe a little more thoughtful,” said John Hanke, founder of Niantic Spatial, the AI world model company and gaming group that made Pokémon Go. “It’s been go, go, go, build, build, build, and some of that has been . . . with head buried in sand.”
Any time you start forcefully shoving shit down someone’s throat there will be a backlash. In the recent old days you had to back everything up with facts, show whether it is beneficial or not and detail the economy of moving forward. Now it’s just Yosemite Sam with guns-a-blazing!
Want some tulips? I can ship you some in 2 months time. Better buy now, to be sure you are the one who gets them.
No thanks. If you’re making a point, it’s way beyond me to grasp. Tulips are pretty and colourful though.
likely referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Yay! Give the RAM back you cunts!
Oh no
I’m glad they put that together. A big part of the reason i am lashing back against AI is to threaten the data centre boom. At least they are starting to grasp the point of all this.
Fuck 'em.
imagine if we put this much into the power grid. Might have cheap electricity instead of centralized AI.
We’d have a working fusion reactor with that kind of money.
“The fact that my business model doesn’t work is an unfair threat to my business model!”
Seems to be good-news-friday
Eeey, it’s Mr. Dong Lover
“Won’t somebody think of the poor billionaires?!”
This sounds like a win for homeowners power bills…infinite growth projections for these projects was ludicrous levels of stupidity.
Yep
I hope that this means thoughtful conversations about how much AI compute infrastructure is actually useful given realistic demand curves, where it should be located, what resources will it require, and, importantly, how the companies that benefit from it will directly share those benefits, as compared to hazy gestures towards “economic development”.
I fear that this is just the industry telling us they’re about to start lying even more than they have.
I mean, these tech CEOs went to college graduation ceremonies and said “None of you will be getting jobs, lol” and went on TV and said “AI will destroy humanity” and then ramped their data center expansion so rapidly that peoples electric bill went up by 300% and when the public hates them and their technology and votes accordingly they are “What happened? How can people be so short-sighted? Why is this so political?”
I dunno, fuckheads, maybe move fast and break things isn’t a popular strategy when applied to society.
The current AI craze is a fraud that’s pushed by the “tech leaders”.
So hungry for money they build “empty” datacenters just to rent them out at a later date to an unknown customer…
Meanwhile the big names are giving each other their money and hardware in some perverse rotation scheme and call it profits.They’re all so glued to it that they urgently need to prevent the bubble bursting lest they destroy all their riches.
So hungry for money they build “empty” datacenters just to rent them out at a later date to an unknown customer…
That’s sadly how most of the real estate industry works, not just data centers.
