Ed Ludlow

In New Jersey, for instance, the new governor, Democrat Mikey Sherrill, has frozen utility rate hikes.

And keeping in mind the vulnerability that consumers are increasingly feeling from rising electricity prices, the last Consumer Price Index report that we saw showed that energy prices are up 6.3% in utility bills, and that compares to 2.4% year over year.

in overall inflation.

So this is a leading indicator in terms of what the president is worried about when it comes to the affordability question, which looms large in the midterm elections, but it also looms large for these big tech companies, which are worried about some of the backlash and blowback from all those investments in artificial intelligence on which they have staked not only so much money, but really their entire businesses.

Bloomberg's Mike Shepherd, thank you very much.

Let's stay with data centers.

We talk a lot about advanced hardware on this program for AI training and inference, but AI is also creating demand for storage, hard disk drives to store the massive data sets AI generates.

That's led to soaring valuations.

like WDs, formerly Western Digital.

This is a stock that has surged in the last year, up 56% or so, so far in 2026.

It's up 8% in the session alone.

WD CEO, I mean, Tan, is with us.

And welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me.

You know, I think there are loads of people that are going to watch this program and be like, I've got a WD hard disk drive, HDD, somewhere in my home.

I understand you have one.

And I have one, right?

And it protects some of my most valuable memories in terms of photos and videos.

But the story is data center, and probably it's underappreciated.

So start with that, where HDD fits in the data center story, and then use that to contextualize what is crazy demand right now.