alt Hacker NewsThe thing you're missing is that the political expenditure of AI in the US is massively tied with the GOP and the far right. There's a reason why people like Elon Musk have been absolutely freaking out over the result.
This result means that unlimited data center expansion may not be on the table, and bailouts certainly aren't either. So with the leaders crashing out the uncertainty of AI expansion is now being properly priced into the stock.
I'm not missing it, I assure you. The politics was just not a huge factor in any larger sense in my opinion. The GOP tie-up was ALSO a narrative. (Though obviously folks thought the President would help with de-regulation, etc)
In the end, States and their utility regulators have to be on board with large data center deployments. Some GOP-led states were often friendly to builders, but their citizens realized what was happening and the backlash was going to happen anyway because of electricity prices. It's just one more nail in the coffin from a cost-of-living perspective, and the utilities hadn't yet passed the costs on to their customers (but it will pop up soon).
States that were led by Democrats were already pushing back for their own regulatory regimes for energy cost recovery, etc. Data centers were wildly unpopular at a STATE level, so it didn't really matter what was going to happen at the federal level.