Will Democrats Really Crush Data Centers?

Welcome, Weekenders!

Might I suggest a weekend of yoga, deep breathing—or perhaps a tin of edibles? In the aftermath of a Democratic romp on Tuesday that also partially seemed like a voter referendum against the AI era, anxiety sure seems to be running high in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street.

That unease has been widely apparent. Tech stocks cratered on Thursday, with the Nasdaq falling 5.5%. (It recovered somewhat on Friday.) A Dutch bank is trying to quickly offload a half-billion-dollar chunk of data center loans, including some tied to OpenAI’s Project Stargate. And Anthropic investors are making gloomy noises about the company’s IPO, worrying that it won’t be able to secure its sought-after $1.5 trillion valuation in a few weeks.

I especially hope someone does a wellness check on Nikita Bier, the former product czar at Elon Musk’s X, who seems to be quite agitated. On X, he looked out into the future and saw a period of, uh, fierce regulatory interrogation for his industry: “This is going to be like the Nuremberg trials for AI researchers.” (A shekel’s worth of PR advice: If you don’t want to be cast as the bad guys, I’d avoid inviting comparisons between your industry and the ultimate bad guys.)

Much of the public worry about AI centers—well, on data centers, which voters do not seem to like very much. In turn, Silicon Valley is concerned that Democrats will bring construction on those facilities to a halt. That’s a doomsday scenario tech hopes to avoid, and to stave off Armageddon, tech is thinking about where else it could put data centers. Overseas is clearly one option, and Google is wasting no time in doing so. On Wednesday, the company said it would spend $15 billion to expand its data center and cloud computing operations in Malaysia. Somewhere besides planet Earth is another possibility: yep, data centers in space! On Friday, investor Ron Baron was on CNBC talking them up, saying they could have “significant capacity” as soon as 2028. Never mind that the economics seem as sustainable as life on Saturn.

But will Democrats really crack down hard on AI—and risk worsening an economy that voters already see as dismal? Politicians from both aisles do dumb things all the time. If I had to bet, though, the left’s anti-AI campaign rhetoric will fade once those lawmakers actually get into office. It’s the natural course of politics, and I take further comfort in making that prediction by looking around New York at this moment and seeing none of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s commie grocery stores. By next year, I suspect AI companies will have found enough wiggle room to squeeze many of their data center projects past Democrats.

AI investor Gavin Baker seems to agree with me. He published an optimistic analysis of the data center plans put forth by Texas’ new governor, Gina Hinojosa, concluding that she “sounds reasonable.” Meanwhile, the state’s new Democratic senator, James Talarico, was out dangling an olive branch to Musk on Wednesday, a day after prevailing in a race in which the billionaire spent heavily to try to defeat him. Talarico described Musk as “a great business leader and entrepreneur and innovator” and vowed to work with him. Musk seemed pleased by Talarico’s remarks. “Nice of him to say that,” Musk wrote on X.

As always, a little flattery can calm the nerves, too.—Abram Brown ([email protected])

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Listening: “The Most Wanted Olympian”

When Canadian Ryan Wedding first vaulted onto the snowboarding scene as a teenager in the late ’90s, the 6-foot-4 wunderkind struck fellow boarders and coaches as a guy with real golden retriever energy—a “gentle giant,” as one mentor recalls. More recently, U.S. authorities have described him in much different terms: as a bona fide drug kingpin, with FBI Director Kash Patel labeling him a “modern-day El Chapo.” (Wedding’s crew allegedly referred to him just as “El Jefe.”) “The Most Wanted Olympian,” a podcast co-produced by The Toronto Star and the Canadian equivalent of the BBC, probes into how Wedding broke bad and established a drug empire that stretched across North America and involved the Sinaloa Cartel. It’s a thrill ride of a story, with cocaine, expensive motorcycles and murders in several different countries.—Abram Brown

Reading: “The Hunt” by Ryan Devereaux

American settlers viewed wolves as a menace and exterminated hundreds of thousands of them as the country expanded west. In the later 20th century, the animals became a cause célèbre, with environmentalists championing their reintroduction within Yellowstone National Park. The proposal encountered fierce resistance from “many a pissed-off local,” as investigative journalist Ryan Devereaux puts it in “The Hunt,” as well as from conservative politicians. (One Idaho congresswoman advocated against the plan by linking it to a “conspiracy theory that armed federal wildlife officials were piloting ‘black helicopters’ in…shadowy enforcement operations across the West.”) Nonetheless, the environmentalists prevailed, but as the wolves have flourished in their new home in the subsequent decades, the hostility has only intensified, culminating in a series of brutal hunts on state-owned land near Yellowstone a few years ago partly led by Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, a hunter with all the adeptness of Elmer Fudd.

“The Hunt” is about those hunts and about the ones that initially wiped out wolves from the Lower 48. It is also about how these cullings have so often been caught up in a broader strife over states’ rights, conservation and Western identity. Wolves have become “a defining culture war Rorschach of the American West,” Devereaux writes. “In a moment like the present, it’s an issue that appears as though it were conjured in a lab for the express purpose of fomenting polarization. And so it has.”—A.B.

Watching: “Black Doves”

It’s been several years since the first season of “Black Doves,” a rambunctious spy escapade starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw (Q from the recent James Bond films), and a good amount of time seems to have unfolded within the Netflix show, too. Helen (Knightley), a covert operative employed by a for-hire espionage ring—the Black Doves—now finds herself residing in 10 Downing Street: Her husband has made it to prime minister, though his shaky hold on power seems destined to be quantified in Liz Truss lettuces. Across town, Sam (Whishaw) has sunk lower into depression and booze; his assassin work doesn’t fetch the rates it once did. Plenty of other prestige TV shows might dawdle and leave their protagonists suspended in moody situ. “Black Doves” does not. As season 2 begins with an absolute mountain of dead bodies, Helen’s handler disappears, and Sam narrowly escapes prison only by accepting a mysterious new patron.

The point of “Black Doves” is not so much the plot, which, as you can tell, is gleefully scattered and preposterous. (As such, I feel fine telling you that you can jump into Season 2 without needing to have seen Helen and Sam’s previous outing.) Its appeal lies in the slick action set pieces and the obvious chemistry shared by Knightley and Whishaw. In a break with genre conventions, their dynamic is strictly platonic: Sam, a homosexual, is Helen’s former mentor in the dark art of covert skulduggery. I, as a homosexual myself, find their relationship a testament to the importance for a woman of finding herself a solid gay bestie, especially within a world of gunfights and bludgeonings.—A.B.