Voters make U.S. data centers harder to build, challenging AI billionaires

For much of the past year, the debate among AI leaders was whether to slow the pace of artificial-intelligence development. Last week, those outside that select community finally had their say, and voters of all stripes chose to pull hard on the only lever available to them. The result is that building data centers in the U.S. just became even more difficult, and perhaps as important, voters issued a challenge to the AI billionaires behind them.

The U.S. challenge is framed as one of building enough factories to hold all of its chips, in contrast to China, where the bottleneck is finding enough cutting-edge chips to fill its AI factories. Which scarcity proves the greater handicap in the AI race remains to be seen, according to the piece. Victorious Democrats must now contend with the outcome while ensuring U.S. AI labs remain competitive on the global stage.