A year ago, politicians of both parties were falling all over themselves trying to attract these economic development dollars into their local communities. They were basically providing tax breaks to these very wealthy tech companies in order to get the data centers built there. But over the last six to nine months, we've just seen this huge change where people either went from being mildly positive or at least neutral towards data centers to today, 70% of Americans now say they have serious reservations about data centers.
People have this image of nuclear when they think about nuclear they think about Chernobyl they think about Fukushima these really salient high impact single events and I think that in some sense that skews our perceptions to thinking that nuclear is incredibly unsafe source of energy.
The challenge when it comes to power demand for AI is that Europe and the US have actually gone through a very very long period of not really building out an electricity grid. Right? Electricity demand across Europe has actually fallen in the last 30 years. In the US it basically hasn't grown much at all. And now we're starting to see this huge demand from AI.
The U.S. is facing a situation where natural gas has become the critical bottleneck for economic growth — not oil, not renewables, but gas. The buildout of data centers, the reshoring of manufacturing, and the electrification of everything are all converging on the same fuel at the same time, and the infrastructure to deliver it simply isn't there yet.
Texas isn't exactly Berkeley or Sandled Brooklynites looking to save the whales. It's because the economics of renewables are overtaking the economics or becoming more attractive than the economics of fossil fuels.
There's a lot of pressure to bring this new energy online very quickly because states are currently competing for the opportunity to attract these data centers, even though the financial benefits of them for the state has not actually yet borne fruit.
