30-Plus Towns Voted Down Data Centers, and the AI Buildout Has a New Bottleneck
As Wednesday's counts firm up, the AI industry is facing a bottleneck it can't fix by ordering more hardware. In Tuesday's elections, 30-plus local measures restricting data centers passed or are leading. Ten states put 41 measures in front of voters, and exactly one, in North Dakota, went the builders' way. Granville, Ohio, banned data centers with 82.5% of the vote. Sunbury's ban lands on a planned Amazon site. Piqua threw out its mayor and two commissioners who backed a big project. In an NBC exit poll, 56% of voters called AI and data centers a major factor in their vote for Congress. Local anger that had been simmering online and at council meetings showed up at the polls.
30-Plus Towns Voted Down Data Centers, and the AI Buildout Has a New Bottleneck
As Wednesday's counts firm up, the AI industry is facing a bottleneck it can't fix by ordering more hardware. In Tuesday's elections, 30-plus local measures restricting data centers passed or are leading. Ten states put 41 measures in front of voters, and exactly one, in North Dakota, went the builders' way. Granville, Ohio, banned data centers with 82.5% of the vote. Sunbury's ban lands on a planned Amazon site. Piqua threw out its mayor and two commissioners who backed a big project. In an NBC exit poll, 56% of voters called AI and data centers a major factor in their vote for Congress. Local anger that had been simmering online and at council meetings showed up at the polls.
Agents everywhere, and the eye-watering numbers behind them
While half the internet refreshes vote counts, the other half has been shipping things, filing things and getting robbed. A few of today's terms are odd even by our standards, so here's a quick decoder:
- S-1: the filing a company makes with the SEC before it goes public. The risk-factors section legally requires it to confess everything that could go wrong, which is why some of the strangest sentences in corporate America end up there.
- Recursive self-improvement: an AI that can build a meaningfully better version of itself. That version builds a better one, and so on.
- App Intents: Apple's framework, around since iOS 16 in 2022, that lets apps expose actions to Siri and Shortcuts.
- Kill switch: in ops, anything that stops a process fast and keeps it stopped. People reliably forget the second half.
Grab a coffee first. Several of these numbers have a lot of zeros.
While half the internet refreshes vote counts, the other half has been shipping things, filing things and getting robbed. A few of today's terms are odd even by our standards, so here's a quick decoder:
- S-1: the filing a company makes with the SEC before it goes public. The risk-factors section legally requires it to confess everything that could go wrong, which is why some of the strangest sentences in corporate America end up there.
- Recursive self-improvement: an AI that can build a meaningfully better version of itself. That version builds a better one, and so on.
- App Intents: Apple's framework, around since iOS 16 in 2022, that lets apps expose actions to Siri and Shortcuts.
- Kill switch: in ops, anything that stops a process fast and keeps it stopped. People reliably forget the second half.
Grab a coffee first. Several of these numbers have a lot of zeros.
Security bills come due (and other bad mornings)
