Hey, did you hear about those elections in the US this past week? You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify , Apple Music , or YouTube . Those platforms also let you subscribe to The Kettle, so you are always notified when the latest episode goes live. The Democratic party has seized control of Congress and state governments around the country. It’s easy to see this entirely as a rebuke of Trump and his policies, but blowback against AI, datacenters, and the tech industry played a role too, if the past week of chaos in markets and Silicon Valley is any indication. Join host Brandon Vigliarolo , El Reg Editor In Chief Matt Rosoff , and special guest, senior reporter at The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto , to talk about what the winds of political change mean for the tech industry. A lightly edited transcript is below:
Brandon (00:04)
Hey everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of The Register’ s Kettle Podcast. I’m your host, Reg Reporter Brandon Vigliarolo, and hey, chances are you’ve heard about those elections we had in the US this week. The Democratic Party dealt a pretty hearty rebuke to Donald Trump, Republicans, and the MAGA movement, with Dems winning elections in states that haven’t gone blue in decades. Now it’s easy to see this as a blowback against Trump and Republican politics. There’s a lot of indication that the tech industry was kind of on the ballot this year, too. After all, they cozied up hard to Trump in his first two years in office in a bid to push AI and promote datacenter projects, and people have been none too happy about any of that. With me to discuss the elections and what they mean for Silicon Valley is Reg editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff and a special guest this week, senior reporter from The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto. Thank you both for coming on, and welcome, Liz. Liz (00:53)
Thank you. It’s lovely to be here. Brandon (00:54)
I was so glad we could make this work. So let’s start off by dissecting the degree to which AI datacenters and attitudes toward the tech industry in general sort of played a role in this election. I mean, were those major elements in the Democratic sweep or just part of the equation? Liz (01:13)
I think they were part of the equation. I think first and foremost people were pissed off about the corruption. And second, people were pissed off about ICE. Having people snatched from your community is the sort of thing that kind of sticks with you. So I think those were probably the two biggest issues. But the corruption is not totally separate from the tech industry, given the way that the tech industry has been cozying up with Donald Trump, the fact that Elon Musk and DOGE were cruising through the federal government, destroying stuff. So those things are related. And then obviously there’s the datacenter stuff, which is universally unpopular, not the only bipartisan issue in the US right now, but certainly a big one. So it’s in there, I think. Matt Rosoff (02:04)
I thought it was interesting that of something like 47 anti-datacenter initiatives on local ballots, 45 of them passed and only one failed. So that seems to me to be some indication that people at least don’t like whatever these things are being shoved down their throats, which is funny because two years ago nobody knew what a datacenter was. Liz (02:31)
I think that there are sort of two things happening here, right? The first is that a lot of these datacenters have been popping up in people’s communities without a robust public comment period. There have been a lot of NDAs being used and backroom deals. And I think most people don’t like that stuff anyway. But add to that how frustrated I think a lot of people are with the tech industry right now. And suddenly this is the avatar of the tech industry doing a bunch of things that people don’t like. And they can’t get rid of Elon Musk. They can’t pry Sundar Pichai out of his CEO role. There’s not a lot you can really do, but you can stop the datacenter. Matt Rosoff (03:20)
They can’t get rid of AI results in search. Brandon (03:24)
Yeah, unfortunately. Liz (03:26)
I think that’s just an expression of that frustration, right? Brandon (03:30)
Yeah, and I think the industry at least has to see it a little bit, right? Because I think it was maybe the day after the elections, OpenAI came out right away and was like, "Hey, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to really try to be better civic citizens in our communities. We’re going to stop signing NDAs." And then they’re also trying to rebrand datacenters as "compute campuses" to make them more attractive, as these aren’t just big warehouses where we’re doing AI processing. We’re trying to do all this other stuff there, too. It just seemed like there’s very much an awareness that, "Oh wow, this may have been a bit of a blowback against us, or at the very least, something we’re going to need to adapt to in a new political cycle." I found it really interesting: I saw a study yesterday, maybe the day before, that said 41 percent of active datacenter projects are in states that Democrats took control of this election cycle, including Texas and my home state of Michigan, where Democrats didn’t just capture federal offices, but state-level legislatures and offices as well. That could potentially mean that a lot of datacenter projects are going to be slowed or stalled completely in the next few years. Is there any indication that that could happen, you think? Liz (04:43)
Well, maybe. I think that the frustration with datacenters has really been growing over the last two years. And you’ve seen things like Project Jupiter in New Mexico where the locals didn’t even know who was coming in, right? There was total secrecy. And then as soon as people figured out what was going on, they made the moves they could to start blocking access to power. And so I think anybody who’s politically ambitious picks up on that and says, "Okay, this is a way to really channel some populist frustration. I can probably ride this." So there’s that part of it. But I also think these people got elected a couple days ago. And in some cases, I think this was a race in Iowa, the Democrat had dropped out because he was sick and got elected anyway. So there’s a certain amount of just pure rage being expressed here. Brandon (05:45)
I’ve heard a lot of people saying that it wasn’t even necessarily a vote for Democrats in many cases as it was a vote against Republicans and their policies. Liz (05:54)
Yeah, so I think that using that as a way to consolidate power is a smart move, right? So you see even before election night’s out, there are these statements like "lawyer up." And I imagine investigating DOGE is going to be super popular because a lot of people lost their jobs, right? Separately from all of the people who died because USAID stopped. I think that there is just a real political will for investigations, for some of this stuff becoming public. And specifically in Texas, you have these emails between Elon Musk and Greg Abbott that have been really heavily redacted. You want a fast and easy political win, you unredact those emails. Brandon (06:44)
And I can’t imagine that the new governor of Texas isn’t going to — leave it to the Democrats to take something like this and completely squander it by sitting on their thumbs and trying to compromise. So part of me is like, "Wow, what a mandate you have. Let’s see how badly you mess this up." I’m hoping that isn’t the case. I’m hoping that we see some actual drive from Democrats to do things like unredact those emails. Give voters a reason to actually say you did something good, right? It’s easy, like we were talking a couple of minutes ago again about datacenters kind of being a scapegoat for the tech industry right now. And Elon Musk is easily that as well, right? He’s the person you can point to and say, "Look at this asshole," and all the things he’s been doing, especially in Texas, right? I’m hoping that they do take that and run with it. He’s been—
Matt Rosoff (07:37)
I think it’s interesting. Texas didn’t just elect a couple Democrats. It was a Democratic slate from top to bottom. And I think a lot of Trump voters showed up specifically to vote against Republicans this time. So I don’t know if that’s all—some of that is related to Paxton being on the ballot and the sort of known history of corruption that he’s shown and the fact that the MAGA movement backed him so boldly. But some of it is, I think, Elon being so loud and so belligerent and charging in and saying we’re just going to do whatever we want and get out of the way. And there has kind of been an arrogance among the tech industry and the tech executives for the past few years, but I think it’s really become loud in the last couple of years. And I think to some degree, datacenters are a backlash against that and some of the ire directed towards Elon Musk is a backlash against that. Liz (08:38)
We all live in the same society, right? We’ve been hearing Sam Altman out here like, "Well, some people are going to die because of AI, and we’re just going to have to accept that as a cost." And it’s like, well, Sam, is that you? Are you planning to die for AI? Because it kind of sounds like you’re talking about me and I don’t like it. Brandon (09:00)
Right. Yeah, it’s the same sort of thing with wars. Some of you are going to have to die. Me and my kids, we’re fine. Politicians are never going to send their sons and daughters to fight these wars. Matt Rosoff (09:11)
I was recently in Washington and talking to some folks there who are involved with federal agencies and the difference between how Silicon Valley and tech companies and startups think of and use AI. I mean, it’s $10,000 token budgets per developer and everybody’s using agents to automate workflows and everything. And in Washington, it’s like, this went way too far, way too fast. How do we stop it? And meanwhile, now AI is uncovering flaws and vulnerabilities in all of this software and all of these online services and web servers that we’ve been using for 25 years. So we’ve got to figure out how to patch all of that. We’ve got people entering confidential information into Chinese models like DeepSeek. So I think that the tech industry got way ahead of itself and the rest of the country is just starting to catch up. And yeah, maybe in five or ten years we will all be using agents and the infrastructure will have been built out to a point where the costs make sense and the ROI makes sense. But right now there’s just this huge disconnect it seems between tech insiders in Silicon Valley and how people actually are using the technology today. So there may be some of that as well. Liz (10:31)
I think that there is a bubble, an intellectual bubble around Silicon Valley where all of these people are talking to each other and hanging out on X and assuring each other they’re the smartest. And they’re saying things like, "Oh, this is going to totally change your life." And the normal person who is using ChatGPT to try to replace their search engine is noticing that ChatGPT kind of hallucinates and it’s not it’s not that good. And there is this impulse on the part of these evangelists to be like, "Well, that’s your problem because you don’t know how to properly prompt the AI." And it’s like, uh-uh, that’s not how you get people to adopt technology. If you remember the internet, when the World Wide Web first happened, people didn’t start using it until it made sense for them to use it. There were people who liked it because tech was their hobby and they thought it was a cool toy. But it wasn’t until there was a reason for ordinary people to start using it that ordinary people started using it. Even online shopping, which I think is one of the very obvious use cases for the internet and was very early on, didn’t catch up to in-person shopping for 20 years. So all of this hyperventilating around AI and how it’s going to change the entire society and eliminate everybody’s job and all of this other stuff, I feel like it’s really misplaced. And it’s not just misplaced because it underestimates the experience the rest of us are having with AI, which is frankly not that great. You’re going to replace my job with this? Good luck. Also there’s just this sort of reality check. If you think about what AI is, it does certain kinds of intellectual work really well. Programming, for instance. Mathematics. But those are not things that require human relationships or resources outside of a computer. Almost all of the rest of us are involved in industries where those things are required. And so, how do you fit AI into that is a really different question. So there are blinders on in Silicon Valley and you can even see it — I live in Oakland and as soon as you leave San Francisco and go to Oakland, you start talking to normal people and they’re just like, "I don’t see the point of this AI. Why are we doing this?" Brandon (13:09)
Yeah, I mean most people I talk to agree it’s kind of useless to a degree, right? The way I think of it is it’s almost like it’s replaced Wikipedia for me, right? It’s replaced — it hasn’t even replaced search, it’s replaced Wikipedia…