Why Amazon Dropped Its OpenAI Movie, Data Center Workers Fight Back, and Meta Leaks Employee Data

Leah Feiger: Yeah. Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, they introduced the Data Center Moratorium Act, which would halt the construction of new AI data centers until there were actual national safeguards. This sounds, in so many ways, like a very baked for left wing issue, but shockingly, this is pretty bipartisan. There are folks from all sides of the aisle getting involved because their constituents are reaching out and going, “What are you doing in my name? What are you doing in my backyard? How is this benefiting me? How is this hurting me?” So I think the thing that I’ve been most shocked by is the bipartisanship of this.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s interesting because I feel like, and this is purely my speculation, but just based on how OpenAI talked about data centers, really came out in front during the first day of the Trump administration, kind of championing big data center build out projects. I was like, I’m reading Chris Lehane, the company’s chief global affairs officer, previously very high up at Airbnb and a political fixer before that as like this was something that he and OpenAI might’ve thought was going to be really beneficial for the company. It was like an America first build, baby, build kind of message.

Leah Feiger: We’re giving jobs to everyone.

Zoë Schiffer: They just misread the moment. They did not realize how toxic this issue was going to be. And now it’s very hard to kind of change their stance when they’ve been releasing press releases every time there was a new data center. Now it’s like, “Uh-oh, we got to keep it quiet because people really don’t like this.”

Brian Barrett: And to your point, they can’t roll it back either way until you can put data centers in space because they need the compute.

Zoë Schiffer: Which by the way, is going to be really difficult to do.

Brian Barrett: If not, impossible. Zoë, is there any chance that the sort of internal dissent, right, electricians saying, “I don’t think so.” Workers inside of companies saying, “Hey, we don’t like data centers either.” Any chance that that changes anything at all in terms of the trajectory for these buildouts, for these companies, for the spending?

Zoë Schiffer: I would be very surprised. I don’t want to say absolutely not because we have seen examples where famously Google workers all came together, pushed back on Project Maven, some of the censored search projects for China and what have you, and actually got those launches paused.

Brian Barrett: Just real quick, Project Maven was working with the Pentagon basically, right, using Google Tech for the DoD?

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly, exactly. So yeah, it’s happened before. It could happen again. What I would say is two things. One, the pushback we’ve seen from the hourly workers has been minimal when you look at the entire workforce. They are bringing in thousands of peoples. I’ve heard that they’re paying much higher rates than people typically get on these jobs. And so I think for an industry that has historically needed a lot of work, I think there will be people who are willing to work on these projects and then we’ll hear little pockets of dissent and pushback, which again is newsworthy, and relevant, and it’s not no one, but I still think they’re able to hire thousands and thousands of people. I would also say that on the corporate level, while we are starting to see more pushback, more vocal opposition from corporate workers in terms of what their companies are doing, it’s still at a far lower level than it was around 2018.