Program and guest
A Yahoo Finance interview with Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The full video consists of his interview segment. Original English title: AI Data Centers Are Now a Midterm Election Issue.
Key points
- Concerns about energy, water and land have shifted public attitudes toward data center construction, and rapid building is no longer widely seen as a good thing. 0:00
- Local governments once competed to attract data centers with tax breaks; that subsidy race is now coming to an end. 1:51
- Data centers have entered Senate races in Texas and Ohio, becoming an issue on which candidates must take a position. 2:21
- Rising local costs will ultimately be reflected in returns on AI infrastructure, potentially changing both the pace of construction and rates of return. 4:55
Background and notes
This article covers Darrell West’s full interview. The program runs 5 minutes and 39 seconds, and this article covers the entire video; all views are paraphrased from the original program subtitles.