Jasmine Sun on What the AI Industry Got Wrong About the Public Backlash

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:03)
Hello, Odd Lots listeners. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:06)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:07)
We're the hosts of the Odd Lots podcast, and we've got something exciting for you.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:11)
That's right. So one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners, and we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:21)
That's right. So if you're in LA, we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood on September 17th.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:30)
We have some really exciting guests lined up, have some really great conversations planned. So go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at bloomberg.com/oddlots, or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:49)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:05)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:09)
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:10)
Joe, there are a lot of interesting angles when it comes to AI.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:14)
Yeah, you think so?

**Tracy Alloway** (1:15)
Yeah, just to put it mildly. But one of the most interesting things, I think, is that we think about it as this ephemeral digital technology. In some sense, it's like the sass of your.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:27)
That's right.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:28)
There's a window that you open on your browser, and you type stuff into the internet, and the internet spits stuff out at you, hopefully not literally. But there is also this very physical component to AI because it involves huge amounts of power, huge amounts of things like memory chips, and of course, put those two things together, huge numbers of data centers.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:50)
No, this has been what is fundamentally different about this, at least from a market's perspective, which is that when we had the sass boom of the prior decade, etc., by and large, the successful companies, they didn't need to go into debt to build data.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:09)
Maybe in someone's garage or whatever, right?

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:10)
Yeah, they were building data centers, but they were not so computationally, they were not so massive that it was like they had to borrow money, they funded them from free cash flow quite easily. The company is building on top of that, they just plug into there. There was always availability on an Amazon Cloud, there was not some compute scarcity, you're not using Slack one day and then it's like, oh, your four-hour window is up, it will reset in a few hours. I guess, we are the physical constraints to the AI build out, which basically in the history of the internet is totally novel.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:45)
Right. I think that's really emerging as in many ways, the prime constraint because it feels like investors still are very happy to more or less fling money at the hyperscalers, at data center projects, at all of those things.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:58)
There's no capital shortage. Right.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:00)
There's no capital shortage. What there is is a shortage of again, power, land, regulatory and political approvals for actually building these things.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:10)
Totally. This is such a big country that it's like, I always think like data centers are great. Just put them out in the middle of nowhere. Then I'm like, that's literally NIMBYism. That's literally what everybody has that thought, there must just be somewhere out in the middle of nowhere to put it. But A, it's going to be in theory near somewhere.
If we could just solve all of our issues by putting everything in the middle of nowhere, there wouldn't be an issue. There are reasons why they're located where they are. They have to be ideally near some sort of power infrastructure, some water infrastructure. These are things that also attract people.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:47)
It's not hard to imagine that the middle of nowhere might not have a lot of energy and water infrastructure.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:53)
Exactly. Otherwise, there would be a bunch of people there.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:55)
Right. The other interesting thing about data centers and AIs is that it's become one of the very few bipartisan issues, I think, in America. You have people both on the left and the right now who are saying that they don't like data centers, they don't want the data centers in their backyard. We interviewed Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, about her moratorium on building new data centers. So there seems to be a lot of, let's say, feelings when it comes to data centers.