Kai Ryssdal

The biggest AI name in town is just a mile away from the Digital Realty building.

So Megan and I drove over and parked at a construction site near NVIDIA HQ.

Probably building another building, right?

I mean, almost certainly they're building another building.

Also in our line of sight, along with NVIDIA and the construction site, were two other data centers run by two different companies.

Unbelievable.

Seriously.

Between us, Megan and I have been to a total of three data centers now.

Talk to me for a second, though, about the people who get left behind.

Because, you know, you're in Silicon Valley, incredible concentration of wealth.

Same with L.A.

and New York and, you know, Washington, D.C.

But there are huge chunks of this country where people don't even have broadband Internet yet.

Forget AI, for crying out loud.

That's why I came up here, to see what the AI economy looks like on the ground and what it's going to mean for you.

Even if you don't use Claude or ChatGPT, AI is still part of your life.

There could be a data center you never knew was there, or you could be invested in companies benefiting from the AI boom through your retirement account without even knowing it.

AI and its trade-offs are here to stay, but how those trade-offs balance out is the question we don't have an answer to quite yet.

This final note on the way out today, if you want to see some of the places we've been, like that big empty data center, you can do that over on our Instagram.

It's Marketplace APM.