The AI Clown Car W/ Gamersnexus

**Ed Zitron** (0:05)
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. God damn, it's your host, Ed Zitron.

**Steve Burke** (0:08)
I am back.

**Ed Zitron** (0:21)
And we are returning with a returning champion of the show, Steve Burke of GamersNexus, who's here to talk to us about how well the semiconductor companies are conducting themselves in this era of AI opulence. I think it's a good way of putting it.

**Steve Burke** (0:36)
Are you happy with them? Oh, they're great. They're so good. The clown industry has never had more candidates.

**Ed Zitron** (0:43)
It's so strange. So you put out this wonderful video about the, what's just we're out, there are no more non-clowns.
It's just, it's, it's funny. There are no non-clowns in the clown car at this point. I think it's accurate. As we record this, they've recently announced that OpenAI and SB Energy are building a data center with NVIDIA backstopping it, but it's not really a backstop. This doesn't feel like a real industry, Steve.

**Steve Burke** (1:12)
It's all, it's all pretend and make believe, I think at this point. I mean, yeah, it's my favorite quote I've heard recently. I didn't see that news today, but my favorite quote was Jim Kramer saying, I like data so much, data center so much, I wish I could live in one.

**Ed Zitron** (1:30)
They should make him.

**Steve Burke** (1:32)
Yeah. Weren't you on CNBC or was that?

**Ed Zitron** (1:35)
I was on CNBC a few times recently and they've not asked me about Jim Kramer living in a data center yet.

**Steve Burke** (1:41)
No, they haven't. Okay. I thought maybe they'd be looking for a realtor.

**Ed Zitron** (1:45)
I want him to go and live in one just so that he can sit around and just get deafened, I assume, because they're pretty loud from my experience.

**Steve Burke** (1:53)
Yeah. I mean, there's so much going on right now because locally we had a data center town council meeting that was supposed to happen actually tomorrow, and I was going to go to that. And the pushback from locals was so much that the applicant withdrew their application for the data center.

**Ed Zitron** (2:16)
Where was this?

**Steve Burke** (2:17)
This was in Raleigh, southeast Raleigh specifically is where they were looking at.

**Ed Zitron** (2:21)
Because there are a few data centers over there, right? I know CoreWeave have some crap.

**Steve Burke** (2:25)
Yep. CoreWeave, they have a good amount of stuff out near the mountains out west, and one of the old former crypto mining facilities has been converted or in the process of being converted into a data center as well out there. But yeah, they're popping up everywhere. It seems like finally, I guess, there's a more widespread public understanding of what it means when a data center pops up.
I was talking with someone on the team about this. Data centers have existed forever, right? And it's interesting.

**Ed Zitron** (3:02)
There's a lot of them.

**Steve Burke** (3:04)
Yeah. And it's just like this particular type of data center for AI processing, it rightly gets a much worse rap and it's far more power consumption. It's typically more water consumption and potentially more land area. And they've sort of ruined it for the rest of the data centers that have been around since the beginning of time, I feel like, but they're all big structures. It's just these new ones and particularly the AI processing solutions tend to be louder and more power hungry.
And so I'm just happy to see that people are finally informed on this stuff and showing up.

**Ed Zitron** (3:50)
I do like the amount of politicians who are like, oh, it's good for jobs. It isn't good for jobs. It isn't good for jobs at all. Oh, it's good for the local economy. It's good for the local economy as long as the data center is being built. And then that stops. And even then, it's how much, how good is that actually economy? We don't really know.
And it's frustrating to watch this happen because it feels like something about data centers is just corrupting everything. Like it corrupted. I remember watching your video earlier today, watching Lisa Sue talk about this, like watching Lisa Sue of AMD who was before this, I would have genuinely been like, that's one of the good CEOs. She's a smart one. She doesn't give in to marketing hype. She's no bullshit person. Listening to her talk about this stuff, it's like she's been huffing paint.

**Steve Burke** (4:37)
Yeah, she was pretty well liked. I mean, my experiences with AMD over the years have been mixed, but broadly speaking, AMD has at least maintained the appearance of, if not the actual practice of being an engineering first company, and Lisa Su technically comes from an engineering background. I'm sure she doesn't do a lot of it these days, but that still counts for something. Yeah. And so does Jensen, to be fair to him.