The Download

Morning Brew Inc.

TL;DR: There might be nothing more politically unpopular right now than being a data center cheerleader. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are taking note—and changing their stance—as the midterm elections approach, while AI companies are desperately trying to buy back some goodwill.

What happened: In an interview this past Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared that AI companies “dug their own grave” amid the data center backlash they’re facing—weeks after he ordered a moratorium on new data center power approvals in the state.

It’s a big shift in tone from a governor who called Texas the “epicenter of AI development” last November. And he’s far from alone: An analysis from The Washington Post shows that American politicians have gotten a lot more negative about data centers since last year. Republican leaders have typically been more welcoming of them than their Democratic counterparts, but a few pro-data center elected officials have either lost their elections or faced recalls in recent months. Now, politicians from both parties are adjusting their stance and ramping up attack ads accusing opponents of being too data center-friendly.

AI’s expensive charm offensive: AI firms, meanwhile, are probably feeling the walls closing in on them. In a private memo that leaked last week, the National Republican Senatorial Committee told AI companies to fix their PR problem, saying they had a “toxic brand.”

To be fair, the industry has been scrambling to improve public opinion—like hosting informational sessions in communities where data centers have been planned. (A recent open house hosted by OpenAI included both job boards and taco bars—and it wasn’t even Tuesday.) Then there’s the throw-money-at-it strategy: Several AI labs have pledged multimillion-dollar investments into data center towns, including Meta’s $1 billion community fund.

The payoff hasn’t come: It’s not clear that the PR blitz is working. A Gallup poll in March showed that 71% of people opposed the construction of data centers in their area. Another survey found that 61% of US adults opposed building them—an increase of 12 percentage points since February and March. As one Democratic pollster told the NYT, the backlash might be about more than just personal impact—it’s a sign of Big Tech disgruntlement more broadly, as data centers are a “physical manifestation” of Silicon Valley excess.

Bottom line: Americans have been loud and clear about being anti-data center. Whether the tech industry can change the public’s great antipathy toward them—not just in time for the midterms, but ever—is still an open question. —WK

Also in data centers…

• Data centers are about to get a whole lot more expensive for builders and customers, with Nvidia reportedly about to hike the price of servers by more than 15%.

      

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Concerns about intellectual property theft and actors and crew being swapped for AI have certainly been discussed. And this makes sense: These are important, pivotal questions that deserve the spotlight.

But now the spotlight is also shifting, and The Intelligence Shift has entered the scene to discuss it.

This episode was filmed parallel to the 25th annual Tribeca Film Festival. Host Dan Priest is joined by Bryn Mooser, cofounder and CEO of Asteria Film. As an Emmy- and Peabody-winning filmmaker, Bryn brings deep knowledge to developing new filmmaking tools powered by AI.

Lights, camera, action—find the discussion here.

The Zeitbyte

Silicon Valley is exhibiting model behavior

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Unsplash

Swapping notes on Chinese peptide dealers is so passé. The newest trend in Silicon Valley is adopting LLM-speak—describing yourself (and presumably others) in terms used to describe AI, per The Atlantic. If you don’t know the answer to something, that might be because it’s missing from your “training data.” New knowledge gained, on the other hand, is like updating your “weights.” Feeling forgetful by hour six of a conversation? That’s “context rot.”

It’s the opposite of slapping human concepts onto machines—“modelmorphism” instead of “anthropomorphism.” But repurposing tech concepts to describe human feelings and experiences is far from new. Who hasn’t needed to “recharge” after a grueling workweek?

So we humbly submit a few modelmorphisms of our own: A task you keep avoiding is simply too “token-intensive.” An uncharacteristically unhinged 1am text means your “guardrails” were down. And getting “prompt injected”? That’s when an Instagram ad convinces you that you absolutely need that portable espresso maker. —WK

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• Multiple passengers reportedly received burns after a laptop caught fire on a plane on Friday.
• MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) seems to be channeling her inner fan fiction writer with a new serialized dystopian novel about sex-hungry presidents.
• A drone guided by an AI system has reportedly killed three Ukrainians, with a colonel saying: “In a few years, we will be living in a Terminator movie.”
• Say goodbye, San Francisco. The US has a new top city for tech talent.
• Want Claude to talk dirty to you? There’s a jailbreak for that.
• The ’80s apparently aren’t nostalgic enough for some people. Instead, they’re going even further back with these carrier pigeon apps.
• Two of music’s biggest heavyweights want you to know that AI is good for the industry, actually.

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