Azeem Azhar

It's actually quite a good thing at this moment where without the build-out of these data centres, the American economy might be heading towards recession.

And the build-out involves things that America has stated and authors like you and your colleague have stated need to happen, which is getting back to building.

When you build a data centre, you pour concrete.

I was speaking to the leadership team of a 140-year-old American engineering firm that

built many of the famous old bridges that you've probably driven across.

They're busy building data centers right now, and it's electricians and project managers and HVAC engineers who are there.

And that feels to me like it's probably quite a good thing to be happening right now.

So I would say that that's...

feels at the economic level pretty interesting.

But let's also recognize there are some other consequences of it.

So everywhere where the data centers are being built right now, we're seeing electricity prices rise.

So that cost is falling on people who are not benefiting, frankly, from the large venture capital rounds in Silicon Valley.

And we are starting to see communities push back.

So just this week, a town in Wisconsin called Caledonia rejected a Microsoft

data center.

And they said, look, we don't like turning farmland into this data center.

And I think that that is quite an interesting tension that's starting to emerge around where will the pressure point of this economic strain fall?

Will it really be purely that it's just too much of the economy?

Or will there also be a political dynamic to it that forces these companies to behave differently?

Well, I mean, crowding out risk is real.