Azeem Azhar

How much control are you going to actually have on this absolutely critical, critical infrastructure?

And it creates this strategic dilemma for states.

There are concrete signals of these smaller companies doing things, of course, the UK, of course, the Gulf.

Brazil and India both have new AI data center projects running into the tens of billions.

But it's going to be really complicated for those middle powers when they think about not so much the models, because you can always get an open source model, but they think about the chips, they think about ultimately the serving infrastructure.

And that is going to play out significantly, certainly over the next couple of years.

But the final one, I think, is this.

And this is the most paradoxical part of this AI wave where 2 billion people are using these tools.

People like nano banana and they like image generation and they like Sora and they like other things.

And yet we know from surveys, Edelman Trust Barometer being one that I use as a barometer, frankly, showing that roughly 70 to 75% of Americans are pessimistic about what AI might bring to them while they even use the tools.

It's almost like you're forced to use them somehow because you need to participate.

It's an uncomfortable place to be.

And I think that that problem is going to become more and more acute.

We're already starting to see resistance in the US to the build-out of data centers.

There's an analyst pressure group that tracks this, and they had identified 142 data center projects of total value over $64 billion stopped in the US since 2023, whether that was happening in Virginia or the Midwest or Pennsylvania or the South.

These groups are organizing and trying to resist the build-out of this infrastructure.

And it's fanatically bipartisan.

So you've got traditional landowners and rural communities connecting up with environmentalists to ensure that the I's get dotted and the T's get crossed, but also at some point that you can resist the build-out of this.

And that, to me, is going to be a really interesting and important tension that will grow over the next year or two.

It does introduce the idea of a legitimacy crunch and how AI companies need to talk about what it is they're doing, which I think they're going to have to do over the next year.