Will Parker

speaker

31 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 19 Jul

Will Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ What’s News · How Governments in the U.S. and Europe Are Stalling the AI Buildout · 19 Jul 2026 podcast

There's a distinction being made between the local governments in these places and their voters and constituents.

Often what you see is that many of the local governments are extremely supportive, right?

I mean, they are the ones that update their zoning codes and try to make their laws amenable to data center developers so they can come in and build these projects.

One of the reasons that they're doing it is that the data centers oftentimes produce

a lot of revenue for local governments.

And there are some that are extremely proud of their track record on this.

Loudoun County in Virginia, for example, often touts how robust their finances are now because of the data center boom and what they're able to spend on public infrastructure and schools and so forth.

And among the general public, separate from local governments, there are people who support the data centers as well, or at least are ambivalent about them.

But there's some opposition almost everywhere.

The main thing that we see is some sort of temporary ban on their construction.

The idea with that oftentimes is that eventually we will allow the data centers to be built once we have more codified rules and expectations of how they're built, what their responsibilities are, what the impact would be to the environment and the electrical grid.

Or at least it starts out that way.

Over time, we'll see if more locations move towards permanent bans, which is less often seen.

You've also seen state governments and lawmakers at that level attempt to pass statewide bans.

There was one that became pretty close in Maine that made it to the governor who ended up vetoing it over a couple of contingent requests that she had made that the legislature didn't fill.

But I think we're going to continue to see more and more attempts to restrict just building them at all, at least temporarily.

There are other ideas that have been floated, like reducing the tax cuts that data centers receive on the purchases of their servers and equipment.

which can be a tremendous amount of tax revenue lost.

Those are the main tools that local governments have been tapping to restrict the growth of data centers.

I don't think it's a uniform response.

Showing 1–20 of 31 · page 1 of 2