by Shum Preston : thevoiceofsanfrancisco – excerpt

The tiny Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park found the AI industry’s pain point in this month’s elections. Voters there took a dramatic step by enacting a permanent moratorium on data centers.

AI executives should look south from their San Francisco offices and pay close attention to this warning. They are about to launch some of the biggest IPOs in history, with record valuations. But these IPOs are coming just as public opposition is growing to the data centers they rely upon.

This could be one of the most important results from this primary election season, even if the Monterey Park moratorium itself won’t have a direct impact. Only one facility was proposed in the town, and it was already canceled by public opposition. But the vote showed that the political weakness of the AI and data center industries can translate into real-world losses.

Even worse, this is likely to be just the first vote of many across the country. AI executives need to toss out their broken political playbook around data centers and improve their pitch to the American public. They need to deal with the perception that they are spiking electricity bills for regular people by outcompeting households for energy…(more)