Meghan McCarty Carino

It's a major market for them.

You know, they make a lot of money selling those chips.

And his argument had been kind of,

It's better to have China rely on American, you know, infrastructure for its whole AI economy.

But in the meantime, China has started to make moves, you know, even as these export controls have been loosened to, you know, deny companies and, you know, different institutions in China from using these chips because they want to grow their domestic chip supply, right?

And this kind of interesting arrangement where the U.S.

government gets a 25 percent cut, which we saw with the H20 chips that they kind of made a deal that I think was for 15 percent.

So this is this is an even higher cut, I guess.

All right, well, now we want to talk about some pressure that's been mounting on these huge AI data centers that are being built all over the country by what we call hyperscalers, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta.

These giant facilities, they basically use as much power as an entire city.

And there's been a lot of concern about how they're affecting electricity prices for the people who live nearby.

Obviously, you know, as a ratepayer,

They pay for the electricity that they use, but they increase competition for that resource, which can raise prices.

They usually necessitate new transmission lines, often new generation facilities.

And those costs are often shared among all rate payers.

So this week, I feel like we kind of reached a critical point, like a watershed moment here.

President Trump said on Truth Social that he wanted tech companies to pay their fair share for the power.

Microsoft announced this new policy to pay more for electricity and to forego some of these sort of tax incentives that often get offered for these data centers.

Here's Microsoft President Brad Smith on CNBC this week talking about how they will be a good neighbor.

Anita, what did you make of all this going on this week?