Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here.
Greetings!
A couple days ago, John Carmack, a videogame pioneer and former virtual reality executive at Meta Platforms, wrote on X that he had begun seeing anti–data center yard signs popping up in his neighborhood. “I am entertaining the idea of paying for a billboard with something like ‘Data centers are awesome, Texas should lead!’” wrote Carmack, who has co-founded an AI startup, Keen Technologies.
In a follow-up post, Carmack compared the brewing public hostility toward AI to the domestic backlash against nuclear power, which snowballed after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. “I consider it a tragedy that anti-nuclear efforts largely strangled nuclear power in the US based on vibes, and I don’t want to see that happen to AI,” he wrote. It’s going to take a lot more than billboards to fix AI’s brand problems with the American people.
In The Information today, my colleague Shane Burke showed just how deeply communities across the country are opposed to data centers with a map and story that documents the more than 300 cities, towns, counties and states that have enacted temporary or permanent data center bans since 2023. A whopping 275-plus of those measures have passed this year alone.
It’s too soon to tell how effective these measures will be in slowing down AI’s progress. The vast majority of them are temporary, for instance. Still, AI’s messaging problem is a real one. At times, it feels like Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs are more interested in responding to the backlash with snarky, unserious posts on X or by pouring funds into dark-money organizations aimed at bringing down perceived political enemies of AI.
It’s not like there are no positive stories for them to tell about the benefits of AI data centers. This week, our AI Infrastructure columnist, Ann Davis Vaughan, pointed out that hundreds of teachers in Richland Parish, La., are set to receive $50,000 bonuses this year thanks to swelling tax receipts from a Meta Platforms AI facility in the area.
Sometimes I wonder—putting my conspiracy hat on—if leaders in the AI ecosystem have decided they don’t really need to convince the public why AI and data centers are so important for Americans to embrace. Perhaps they don’t think persuasion will work. Or maybe they believe that before long they’ll be able to bypass the public blowback against data centers by putting them in space, away from pesky community activists. Both attitudes are wrongheaded. If they want Americans to accept AI, they need to talk to them, not just to their reply guys on X.
A Videogame Mega Event
Take-Two Interactive Software said today that Grand Theft Auto VI, the next installment of its hugely popular game franchise, will be available for pre-ordering tomorrow at midnight local time in two versions that cost $80 and $100 each. The game itself will be available to play on Nov. 19, though Take-Two wisely will allow people to begin downloading it onto their game consoles on Nov. 12 to avoid crashing the internet.
This is not going to be a normal game launch. Take-Two said in May it had sold over 230 million copies of Grand Theft Auto V in the 13 years since that game came out. Other videogame publishers have scrambled to avoid releasing competing games around the time the new version of the game comes out in November.
Here’s my wildly speculative list of other potential knock-on effects from Grand Theft Auto VI’s arrival:
A jump in PTO requests to managers in late November
A surge in ordering from Uber Eats and DoorDash
A drop in engagement from male audiences on Netflix
A lot of sleep-deprived men
In Other News
• Qualcomm has agreed to pay around $3.9 billion in stock for Modular, a software startup that allows developers to write software that can run run on different chips without having to rewrite the code for each chip.
• OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled a new chip the two companies have developed for inference, dubbed Jalapeño. It’s a big step forward in OpenAI’s effort to reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips and control its own hardware.
• Ornn, a startup that tracks the cost of AI tokens and computing power, raised $33 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The money will be used to build a marketplace for trading compute, executives at the company told Bloomberg.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today's episode of TITV in which we unpack why Vista Equity Partners launched a new cloud services company.
Recommended Newsletter
Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week.
Request an invitation to join The Information and EY for an exclusive dinner bringing together senior leaders for candid conversation on closing the trust gap in enterprise AI.
Get ahead of the story. Purchase your ticket to AI Agenda Live, where The Information's reporting team convenes the leaders driving the next era of AI. Early Access pricing available now.
Tickets on sale now: The Information returns to Napa Valley October 27–28 to convene senior women across tech, media, and finance. Join us for two days of intimate, candid conversations with the leaders navigating today’s global shifts.
