00:08:37 · Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane
[00:08:37] S1: I think you just got an endorsement from, you know, one of Sean's pups there. [00:08:42] S2: From my dog. Yeah. I mean, like, no. Listen. Compute campuses are where the super intelligence is made, Anthony. Don't you see how this all comes together? This is just the way it works now. Yeah. I mean, this is ridiculous. Like, come on. Like, it... It's not gonna change anything. It's gonna cause them more effort. For a company that likes to say that it's no longer focused on side quests, OpenAI still loves to go in different directions a lot. And this is just like the latest kind of thing where it's just like, why are you spending time on this at all? You know, it doesn't really seem like it's going to move the needle. They have other fish they need to fry. Like, it's just... I felt like such a waste of time to try and, like, make people think [00:09:26] S1: of this. Great idea for OpenAI because in the spirit of making threatening things seem cute, they should 100% create, like, compute campuses, like avatar cutesy thing, and then just present that, you know, instead of, you know, a power energy sucking, water sucking data center.
00:09:48 · Anthony Ha
[00:09:48] S0: I'm sure that's that's gonna happen anytime soon now. I mean, they could also, like, build more of their own offices. And if these are just com... Lovely compute campuses, they should just build their own office... The offices there or work next door, see how that works out for them. I I think it's something else that I'm wondering about is it... To what extent the election is also maybe, like, just this... Actually, kind of the the second part of, like, a one two punch of something that I think we alluded to last week, but but kind of became a little bit clearer shortly after we we recorded, which is also that there's just been this, like, reshaping of how... Or a big shift in how Wall Street is reacting to a lot of these hyperscalers and AI companies in this sense that they're not excited about the idea that, you know, they should be spending all this money building new data centers, spending all this money on compute. And so in a sense, there's now a financial incentive not to build all these data centers. And so I'm I'm very curious how that's gonna play out, that there's regulate... That probably it's gonna be harder to build data centers. Wall Street is probably not gonna reward you for building data centers, but at the same time to get to the scale that they want to get to, they're probably going to need to build data centers somewhere.
00:10:57 · Sean O’Kane
[00:10:57] S2: Yeah. Look up. You know? Look look up in the night sky. There... You know? We've talked so much about, you know, setting aside the technical feasibility of, you know, data centers in space that the attractive qualities of it, especially for someone like Elon Musk, are that there is, you know, there's no nimbyism in space. There are no, you know, not really kind of an environmental regulator that's gonna chase you down if you've got, you know, something something coming off, venting off of your your space data center. There are all these reasons why, you know, companies like SpaceX are looking at this idea or Google, which has launched its first sort of really small scale test and started it up, Project Suncatcher. And, you know, the thing is, like, my point earlier about data centers maybe taking up too much of the focus of of tech... The world of tech and tech executives is I think there is... Listen. Even if data centers on the ground get shut down or slowed, you know, to an unworkable timeline and, you know, the focus shifts to orbital data center, sure, whatever, that... There's a lot of lag in between now and when that actually means anything. And in the meantime, there's a lot coming, I think, for big tech in general. I think we're gonna see whole suite of hearings where these executives are gonna have to sit in front of congress, the democratically controlled congress. They're gonna have to answer for, you know, money that they paid to the Trump administration and to the inauguration committee, and they're gonna have to answer for what Doge did, you know, which never really has gotten a very good, like, full clinical accounting of of all the different things that all the different Doge people did. And so, like, there's just so much that's gonna happen between now and I think when when we will actually see the data center stuff. And I think there's there's... The last point I'll make is, like, there's evidence in the market of this too because CoreWeave and some other companies have been trending downwards since Tuesday and their, you know, their debt is not looking as great. But also there's, you know, Anthropic just landed, like, one of the best... Their biggest debt packages ever. SpaceX just loaded up on, like, $40,000,000,000 more debt.
00:13:14 · Sean O’Kane
So there's hedging going on in the market for sure when it comes to the more AI and data center focused people and... Or companies. And, you know, from there, I think there's just gonna be a lot more for these tech executives to worry about in the near term.
00:13:30 · Kirsten Korosec
[00:13:30] S1: Yeah. I mean, speaking of the near term, I mean, just yesterday, Meta's head of platforms, Dina Powell McCormick, she's at the Wall Street Journal tech conference and and was saying a lot of the points that Anthony was mentioning about it's gonna be harder to get data centers. And she said something that I thought was really interesting, and she said, I can tell you that every hyperscaler is now thinking about, do we need to build outside of The United States? Which I thought was pretty spicy comment, really, because when you think about it, a lot of this push for compute campuses, AI data centers, whatever you wanna call them, is wrapped around the idea of The United States winning the race in AI and how important it is for us to have infrastructure here in The United States. So, you know, back to that transition about talking about space, is that's what... Is that what she's referring to, or is she referring to literally putting these in Canada or in other areas? This really reminds me of another life of mine when I covered energy industries, specifically oil and gas. And what I learned during those times is there was a lot of lobbying and gnashing of teeth about this idea of being regulated. But once the industry was regulated, what they really wanted was certainty in the marketplace. And then they responded, and they adhered to that for the most part. And I say for most part in light quotes. Regulatory certainty actually matters in the marketplace, and so I think that that is what has been missing. It's been a bit of a free for all. And putting local standards and forcing these companies to adhere to those as long as they don't continue to change and and swing the different... A different way within a year or two, I think that they can adjust just fine. And I don't think they need to go outside The United States or in space. That's my prediction. But that's my rant. We'll see how it turns out, and you can call me on it next year if I'm completely wrong. But there's other things that are happening within the industry, and that is seems to be like some workforce corrections happening. And I wanna kick it off by mentioning that Canva is laying off over 1,200 people amid slowing growth. And I'm wondering, is this just the results of what we've been seeing building up to this moment for the last, you know, year, or something else going on?
00:15:45 · Anthony Ha
[00:15:45] S0: I was wondering about that myself in that, you know, on some level, it feels very... Just like of a piece of the fact that, like, every tech company has been laying off, you know, some significant portion of its workforce in the last few years, you know, usually sort of connecting that in some way to AI. And, you know, then there's also sort of debates about sort of, like, AI washing and is this actually also they just had to sort of correct for maybe overhiring during the pandemic. But it it also seems like Canva and and another company that had layoffs recently, Squarespace, and both of them laid off about 20% of their workforce. They do seem connected also in this sort of broader sense of these are tools that made, in one case, of creating, like, you know, images, graphics, art, and in the other case, websites simpler. And so, of course, when you are kind of the the next step in that kind of, you know, democratization, that simplification, what... You know, whatever you wanna call it, there's always a risk that somebody can kind of come up from below and make it even simpler and more accessible. And so it makes sense to me that as much as I don't necessarily think the the AI versions, the vibe coded versions of, say, a personal website are necessarily better, that that would be a very major threat to both of these companies.