Like analysts who projected that Democrats won’t try to block all data center development, Ng suggested that the AI buildout won’t come to a complete halt following the “blue wave” unseating many Republicans. However, a Democrat-controlled Congress will likely “introduce new constraints on US computing capacity,” and that could give China a leg up, Ng suggested.
“This would keep [US] AI token prices high, giving China an opportunity to export cost-effective inference services, supported by abundant electricity supplies,” Ng said.
At the furthest extreme, US data center opposition could push giants like Amazon or Google to build hyperscalers outside the US, Ng suggested. That outcome represents the opposite of Trump’s vision for 100 percent US-made tech, which experts have warned is an impossible dream.
Michael Strobaek, global chief investment officer at Swiss private bank Lombard Odier, noted that Trump still has power to veto any federal laws that Congress may advance. Democrats will likely need “substantial Republican support” to pass laws over a potential veto, Time reported. However, with a majority, Democrats could threaten to block Trump’s efforts to roll back EPA protections to aid data centers, according to some analysts.
Musk among election day’s biggest losers
On Wednesday, Trump did not directly mention AI in a batch of Truth Social posts reacting to election results. Instead, he seemed to blame Fox News for hosting Democrats, while arguing that outcomes would somehow have been different if he was on the ballot.
But Trump’s silence suggests that he has no talking points to gloss over the fact that polling from Blue Rose Research showed that “Americans would rather live near a prison, methadone clinic, or a nuclear power plant than an AI data center.” And while existential fears that AI firms like Anthropic have recently warned about are a concern for many Americans, “concrete local impacts” like higher energy bills or pollution “were far more salient” for voters, Blue Rose’s director of research, Ali Mortell, told Time. And even when developers promise to cover costs, “trust in institutions is low,” to the point where even “when tech companies and politicians offer reassurance,” Mortell said, “voters are not positioned to believe that’s true.”
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