Michelle McPhee

Right now, I think, yeah, maybe.

Wow.

Interesting.

I have asked a version of this exact question to executives at the top of OpenAI and Anthropic.

And I've put it in almost the exact same words that you put it.

I said, you may not realize this, living out in California, but here in DC, I can tell you that there is a populist wave that wants to shut you guys down, that wants to make it politically impossible to build data centers in the United States, that thinks that artificial intelligence is

Frankly, as the executives often promise, a kind of demonic force that is guaranteed to displace or disemploy or destroy tens of millions of jobs, and they're going to try to stop you.

What are you going to do next?

One answer that I've heard is that what they're going to do next is build the data centers overseas, period.

And the data centers can be built overseas.

Some of them are being built overseas.

And if you look at the backlog of data center construction in the US, it's quite significant already.

So I do think that a data center moratorium

or even maybe less officially, a kind of pointillist, populist backlash to data centers that makes it hard for them to be built in parts of the country, parts of the Rust Belt, parts of the Midwest where a lot of them are coming online, even parts of Loudoun County near where I live in Washington, D.C.,

data center alley, it's absolutely possible that they could find it harder to build those data centers in the US and they're going to have to shift data center construction overseas.

I'm not confident that that alone is going to stop the scaling of artificial intelligence.

I think it's going to make it harder for it to be built in a place where we control and might have...

some unforeseen consequences.

If, for example, data center construction is shifted to a country, let's say in the Middle East, where we don't have the kind of security over those data centers that we would hope to have in the US, what kind of crisis does that create five years down the line?

That's an interesting sort of second-order consequence.