Big Technology Podcast
00:00:00 · Alex Kantrowitz
[00:00:00] S0: Now that the Democrats have swept the US midterms, is the AI industry about to get stopped in its tracks by a hostile government? We'll talk about it with New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer right after this. This episode is brought to you by Cribl. Quick question. Question. Is your IT budget growing 30% a year? Because your data is. And now AI agents are piling on, running investigations around the clock and running up three meters at once, storage, queries, and tokens. Cribl, the AI platform for telemetry, was built for exactly this. Own all your data, query it wherever it lives, and let Cribl route every AI request to the right model at the right price. The best part, AI inference for workloads on Cribl is included. Models will change. Agents will change. Your data is the asset that lasts. Own it with Cribl. Visit cribl.io. How do you price intelligence as a service? How do you charge for delivering end to end work, not just access? Those questions remain front and center for AI founders and operators, and getting to the right fit business model, whether that's selling usage credits, outcomes, seats, or a hybrid combination, requires constant iteration. Chargebee is the billing and monetization infrastructure that powers just that for ambitious, fast scaling AI businesses. Visit chargebee.com/alex to learn more. That's chargebee.com/alex. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Stop the presses. We had an episode scheduled for today, but after the big Democrat win in both the Senate and the House, we could see some major shifts in the AI build out coming. So we scrapped our traditional plan for Wednesday, and we're bringing in New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer for an emergency episode about the implications, the potentially far reaching implications of what this midterm win from the Democrats will potentially be extremely hostile to the AI agenda could mean for the AI build out and the massive business that is expecting the build out to continue to go as planned. Teddy, it's good to see you. Welcome to the show.
00:02:13 · Teddy Schleifer, Alex Kantrowitz
[00:02:13] S1: Thanks for having me. [00:02:16] S0: So I'm looking at The New York Times homepage right now. Headline at the top, Democrats will have huge majority in the house. The senate right now has 54 Democrat seats to 44 Republican seats, and the house where they're still counting as 230... They're counting in... Still counting in both, but the the house has more outstanding, 237 Democrat seats to a 147 Republicans. Obviously, this is gonna have major implications on the AI build out, because a lot of these candidates were talking about data centers. They're talking about AI safety in their victory speeches like Jon Ossoff did, the Georgia senator, when he won, on Tuesday. So what are the implications for the AI build out, and what's your broader reaction to what happened off the bat? [00:03:06] S1: Yeah. I mean, it's it's clearly gonna be a new time for the tech industry. I mean, this is not the 2025, 2026 bull run that the industry had politically. I mean, going forward, there is gonna be obviously a Democratic majority in both chambers, which are gonna be not as pro AI and not as pro data center as the Republican majorities that this industry has enjoyed for the last two years. And, you know, just how bad it is, I don't I don't totally know yet, but the... I think we're gonna look back on the last year and a half as as as a bygone era when this this... It was so unencumbered that we we didn't appreciate it in the moment.
00:03:53 · Alex Kantrowitz
[00:03:53] S0: Now for me, when I think about US politics, I always think, well, the bark is typically louder than the bite and especially regarding their regulation of tech and the rules they've applied to tech. They haven't really done much even though there've been, like, clear exes. Like, all these companies lost, All the big tech companies lost, antitrust cases or had to settle them with the FTC and the DOJ, and yet nothing really stopped them. But I do wonder if this time is different or at least if we're gonna see an even greater backlash than we did previously. And one of the things that makes me think about this is a lot of the, things that need to happen for the AI build out to continue are physical. Right? The world... The word is build out. They need compute. They need data centers to continue to expand and serve their models. And, let me just read you a, a headline from the Washington Post, a Nash... A a nationwide backlash against data centers erupts at the polls. Voters in at least 38 jurisdictions across the country passed bans or restrictions on data centers on Tuesday, 38 jurisdictions, reflecting the widespread public revulsions to the facilities and adding to the growth growing pushback on the ambitions of the artificial intelligence industry. I mean, enough said. Right? 38 jurisdictions voted were for bans or restrictions on data centers. So on top of this wave where, by the way, they're probably gonna be reading the tea leaves here, you have a massive amount of voters coming out and saying, we don't want data centers in our backyard. So what do think the implications are there?
00:05:23 · Teddy Schleifer
[00:05:23] S1: Yeah. I mean, this is as close to a a national referendum as you're gonna get. I mean, this is obviously a brand new industry with... Where the politics are still being sorted out in real time. And, clearly, a lot of Americans in 38 different places at least feel the same way. I I haven't reported a ton on on on these different or at all on these referendum or referenda, but clearly, 38 to zero is is is a pretty good average. I mean, we also saw for the first time this election, the data center industry do their own super PAC, which is kind of a... I think speaks to the ways in which the political winds are blowing here, which is that all of this political energy around AI, I think is gonna be channeled much more narrowly into the next battle around data center specifically, where... Why do you start a data center super PAC? It's because you have... You face political challenges or or policy headwinds. And the data center super PAC spent a bunch of money to try to help elect Darlene Graham in South Carolina. She did not win. And I think going forward, lot of... As a lot of these fights kind of take off, you know, there's gonna need to be money spent on behalf of the data center industry, because clearly, regular people are voting the other way. I mean, that's why advocacy operations happen. It's to basically convince people to do something that they wouldn't do otherwise. And right now, a lot of voters are registering their point of view, and the data center industry is only beginning to kind of play play offense. So, you know, I think we're just getting started here, and I think next 2028, I think there's gonna be a ton of spending politically on data centers.
00:07:12 · Alex Kantrowitz
[00:07:12] S0: Now, you're the world's preeminent reporter on how tech money influences politics. And Thank you. It's true. Advertorial. It's true. Yeah. Okay. Folks, for those listening, Teddy and I are friends in case you can't figure it out, but it's it's really true. No one does it like you, Teddy. And I just wanna hear your perspective on what your sources are telling you about what the implications are gonna be if you can share. Because I would imagine they are likely, like the people who are politically active in tech, spending money to get their agenda, they were very pleased in 2024. I imagine they're equally terrified now.
00:07:53 · Teddy Schleifer
[00:07:53] S1: Yeah. I mean, look. The the the comeuppance here for for the tech industry, I think, is still TBD. But clearly, like, I don't think we're appreciating just how good they had it. You know, on on on AI in particular, I mean, this was an administration that was very pliant to the industry. The the... You know, Trump is still gonna be the white... In the White House. It's not as if there's gonna be, like, massive, you know, democratic reforms that are gonna be passed from both chambers and and signed by president Trump. I think I think it's probably unlikely. But there's gonna be guardrails now in a way that there wasn't at least in terms of legislation. And there's gonna be investigations too. Right? I mean, you know, take Elon Musk who, you know, is is suddenly gonna be in in the barrel in a way that he was not two days ago. So whiplash was coming. Right? I mean, you went from being, you know, a co president or for or while effectively kind of helping lead the US government to suddenly being, like, testifying on the hill, and there's gonna be this whole whole effort by Democrats, I think, to atone for the last two years of what Democrats see as as industry run amok. So I expect it to be pretty brutal. I think that the political calculus is changing rapidly for all these companies too. Like, I think there's gonna be... There's been all there have been all these jokes I've seen on Twitter or about, like, these efforts by Democratic or tech companies to, like, re embrace their DEI policies, and then, you know, re embrace kind of their their Democratic bona fides. Like, it's a joke, it's funny because there's an element of truth to it. I think there's gonna be, you know, tech companies that are hiring or promoting, you know, government relations heads who are tied to the Democratic Party and making sure that they know that they have a Democratic mega donor in leadership, stuff like that. Part of this is perception. And I think the companies wanted to fulfill a certain perception from 2025, 2026, and they'll fulfill a different perception in the next two years.