Meghan McCarty Carino

And there's been this kind of backlash building in a lot of areas.

You know, this news organization, Heatmap, has estimated that 25 big hyperscale data centers have been canceled due to community pushback in the last year.

And it's kind of making for some interesting headlines

It's bringing together, you know, kind of anti-tech populists and environmental justice types and just, you know, general kind of, you know, NIMBY concerns.

This week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned in his State of the State speech against AI and data centers, and he called for AI regulation.

Anita, what do you make of kind of how this is shaping into a political issue?

Yeah, I thought it was really interesting to sort of see this move from President Trump, who has been kind of very bullish on the AI infrastructure build out, has really been pushing for it.

And now there have been all of these sort of concerns raised about

affordability and, you know, electricity prices, really kind of putting pressure on the administration and any politician that is kind of seen as being, you know, in favor of this whole build out that a lot of communities are not really happy with the tradeoffs.

We'll be right back.

You're listening to Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

We're back with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information.

All right, well, finally, we wanted to talk about this new partnership that Apple announced to use Google Gemini to power some of its more advanced AI features, like the long-awaited new AI Siri.

Anita, how big of a deal is this?

Yeah, I mean, Google, it seems like with its AI has been on kind of a winning streak lately.

We had that, you know, code red that we heard about OpenAI having because, you know, Google Gemini had sort of surpassed OpenAI models in some benchmarks.

It was getting, you know, really good download numbers, of course.

Google has an advantage here in terms of the devices, Google's own devices, and now sounds like it's going to have an advantage in terms of Apple devices.

This is a really powerful advantage for Google.