Voters just told Big Tech to slow the data center buildout
Issue #074 · 4 min read
Voters just told Big Tech to slow the data center buildout
Texas flipped on data centers, Meta buys another coding startup, and GitHub Copilot lands in Xcode
The big story
Texas was supposed to be the safe bet.
Cheap land, friendly regulators, the fastest-growing data center market in the country. Big Tech built there because nobody would stop it.
Then the state voted the other way. Democrat James Talarico won a US Senate seat. Gina Hinojosa won the governor's race. Both ran, in part, against the data centers — that's MIT Technology Review.
This isn't a one-state story. Data center opposition crossed party lines in Tuesday's midterms, and the industry's response has been to argue the backlash is "anti-Trump" rather than anti-tech — that's the line tech lobbyists are running, according to Ars Technica.
Whether voters were angry at a president or angry at their power bill is not actually the point.
The point is that the places willing to host a data center without a fight are running out. The Verge put it plainly: data centers lost the midterms. And TechCrunch thinks this is the warm-up, not the main event.
Meanwhile the buildout itself shows no sign of slowing. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta all just posted earnings that say the spending continues regardless — that's The Verge again.
Something has to give. Either the spending slows, or the fights get louder, or both.
For product teams, the honest read is: if your roadmap assumes infinite, cheap compute forever, this is the week to ask your infra team what happens if a permit gets denied somewhere it never used to.
What shipped
GitHub Copilot now works inside Xcode's built-in coding assistant. The integration is in public preview — that's the GitHub changelog. If your team ships iOS and has been waiting for Copilot to stop feeling like a guest in Apple's tooling, this is the moment to try it.
Meta just bought Conductor, a startup that lets engineers run teams of AI agents on a project at once. TechCrunch has the deal. Worth watching less for Meta's internal use and more for what it says about the going rate for agent-orchestration teams right now — acquirers are paying for the orchestration layer, not just the model.
OpenAI is acquiring Pierre Computer Company to expand what Codex can do with building, understanding, and reviewing code. Light on detail so far — that's OpenAI's own announcement. Worth a line in your "who's consolidating the coding-agent space" tracker, not yet worth a strategy memo.
One to flag rather than celebrate: an independent researcher reported a real billing flaw in Claude Teams — one that let a team pay the minimum fee for effectively unlimited top-tier inference — and says Anthropic's HackerOne bot closed it as informational within the hour, per the Hacker News thread. We only have one side of this. But if your company runs a bug bounty program, it's a useful reminder to check who — or what — is triaging the reports that come in.
What I'd actually do this week
Check whether any part of your 2027 roadmap depends on a specific data center region coming online on schedule. If it does, ask infra for a plan B.
If you ship on iOS, get one engineer to spend thirty minutes with Copilot in Xcode and report back whether it's actually usable or just technically present.
If you run a bug bounty or vulnerability disclosure program, pull the last ten "informational" closures and have a human reread them this week.
Hit reply if you've tried Copilot in Xcode or have a bug bounty horror story of your own — I read all of these.