View / There’s a silver lining for data center builders amid the ‘blue wave’ - Semafor
The market’s freakout, driven by AI-related stocks, suggests a US midterm election that spells disaster for the tech industry. That’s not the full story.
For one, many of the 40 local and state anti-data center measures that passed this week won’t halt construction altogether and certainly won’t affect compute coming online until 2029, at the earliest. What they mainly do is require tech companies to offer concessions and guarantees that a lot of the hyperscalers and data-center builders were already moving toward anyway, such as by offering cheap power, school funding, or distributing stock to help spread the wealth.
Despite the fair amount of mudslinging at data centers and Big Tech from a number of victorious Democratic candidates, many of the tech executives I’ve spoken to this week see the vote as a rejection of the fringes on both the right and the left — and they’re relieved about that. A move to the center may mean more productive relations between government officials and the tech industry, they say, and neither side wants to screw it up. Democrats also don’t want to cause a recession, and they know tech is the economy’s bright spot.
Sure, a lot of tech leaders made tactical blunders over the last couple of years when it comes to politics. Supporting a single candidate or a single party is always a bad move in the long term. Companies that took money from the president’s family or got sweetheart government contracts are going to face real scrutiny. We all can agree that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg went further than he needed to in bending the knee to President Donald Trump, and got little for it.
But companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet, which have mostly played the long game politically, won’t have to change much — they stayed close to both parties. They get that the political landscape is always changing, sometimes very quickly and drastically. And when that happens, you want as many friends as you can get.
