Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Anthropic Is About to Tell Wall Street That You Being Angry Is a Risk to Its Business
Transcript
- 0:00[Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the angry neighbors made it into the legal paperwork. CNBC reported Friday that when Anthropic's stock offering documents land in the coming weeks, public anger at AI and at data centers will be listed as a risk factor.
- 0:16[Guest] A risk factor is where a company warns future shareholders how this could go wrong. Anthropic is putting your opinion of it in there.
- 0:25[Host] We covered that filing in June, when Anthropic went to the SEC quietly at close to a trillion dollars.
- 0:32[Guest] Back then the worry was internal. Quarterly earnings, lobbying money, who owns the frontier. Now bankers keep asking whether the neighbors will let them build.
- 0:41[Host] Asking who?
- 0:41[Guest] CNBC says that in test-the-water meetings in San Francisco, investors are pressing Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao on margin pressure from open models, and on what happens if the buildout slows.
- 0:52[Host] And the business?
- 0:53[Guest] Anthropic topped a sixty-five billion dollar annual revenue run rate in July. Compute capacity is what that revenue is made of.
- 1:01[Host] So the anger has cost them nothing yet.
- 1:04[Guest] Nothing. Investors talk about floating the company near two trillion. Record opposition, record valuation, same week.
- 1:09[Host] Record opposition measured how?
- 1:11[Guest] Gallup published a survey in May. Seven in ten Americans oppose an AI data center being built in their area.
- 1:18[Host] That isn't a fringe. That's most of my street.
- 1:21[Guest] Pew reported this week that fifty-two percent of Americans are more worried than excited about AI in daily life, up from thirty-seven in twenty twenty-one. The reason young adults give first is jobs.
- 1:33[Host] Unpopular still isn't the same as stopped.
- 1:35[Guest] It is once it reaches a governor. Tuesday in Harrisburg, Josh Shapiro signed an order requiring data centers to bring their own new power capacity and carry the grid costs they create.
- 1:47[Host] So that cost stops landing on my electric bill and starts landing on theirs. That bill is the whole fight.
- 1:54[Guest] It is. Same day in Florida, Byron Donalds won the Republican primary for governor having proposed data center limits himself.
- 2:01[Host] Both parties, one Tuesday.
- 2:03[Guest] And the Republican Senate campaign committee wrote it down. In a memo obtained by Axios, they say of their Ohio senator, if he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice, and they will not go near the next one.
- 2:19[Host] Why does a disclosure document matter more than a memo or a poll?
- 2:24[Guest] Because most risk sections are wallpaper. SpaceX warned investors that adverse macroeconomic conditions may hurt its business. Naming a specific angry public is a lawyer conceding something specific could actually happen.
- 2:35[Host] So Anthropic is admitting the buildout might not be allowed to finish.
- 2:39[Guest] Admitting it can't finish alone. The wires to that compute run through counties that vote, and in Ohio people are gathering signatures to put a data center ban on the ballot.
- 2:50[Host] Then the real question is what would make a neighbor say yes.
- 2:54[Guest] Nothing in the filing answers that. Anthropic can name where the brake is. It has no way to release it, because releasing it means the electric bill stops being the argument.
- 3:05[Host] Which is where Patrick Deglon lands in Unscarcity. He calls it the Foundation: energy, housing and healthcare delivered as infrastructure instead of sold, kept off the cap table so nobody can re-price your survival.
- 3:17[Guest] A neighbor who isn't paying for the buildout twice has nothing to vote against. For more on that, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.