Why Amazon dropped its OpenAI movie, data center workers fought back, and employee data was leaked

Leah Weiger: Yes. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, introduced the bill Data Center Moratorium Lawwhich would halt the construction of new AI data centers until effective national safeguards are in place. In many ways, this seems like a very baked-in left-wing issue, but shockingly this has bipartisan support. There are people on all sides of the aisle participating because their constituents are reaching out and saying, “What are you doing in my name? What are you doing in my backyard? How does this benefit me? How does this hurt me?” So I think the thing that shocked me the most was the bipartisanship.

Zoe Schiffer: It’s interesting because I feel like, and this is just my speculation, but based on the way OpenAI talked about data centers, it really came to the fore during the first day of the conference Trump administrationa type of support for large data center construction projects. I was like, I’m reading Chris Lehane, the company’s chief global affairs officer, who previously had a very senior position at Airbnb and a policy coordinator before that because like this was something that he and OpenAI probably thought would be really beneficial to the company. It was an America first, baby, build kind of message.

Leah Weiger: We give jobs to everyone.

Zoe Schiffer: They misread the moment. They didn’t realize how serious this problem was. Now it is very difficult to change their position when they were issuing press releases every time there is a new data center. Now it’s like, “Oh, we have to keep it quiet because people don’t really like this.”

Brian Barrett: And from your point of view, they can’t bring it back in either direction so you can put data centers in space because it needs to compute.

Zoe Schiffer: Which, by the way, would be very difficult to do.

Brian Barrett: If not, it is impossible. Zoe, is there any chance that there’s some kind of internal dissent, right, the electricians say, “I don’t think so.” Workers inside companies say, “Hey, we don’t like data centers either.” Is there any chance that this will change anything at all about the trajectory of these constructions, these companies, and the spending?

Zoe Schiffer: I would be very surprised. I don’t want to say no at all because we’ve seen examples where all the famous Googlers got together, opposed the Maven project, some censored research projects in China and so on, and in fact these launches were paused.

Brian Barrett: Very quickly, Project Maven was essentially working with the Pentagon, right, using Google Tech for the Department of Defense?

Zoe Schiffer: Exactly, exactly. So yes, it has happened before. It could happen again. What I would like to say are two things. First, the opposition we saw from hourly workers was minimal when you look at the entire workforce. They bring thousands of people. I’ve heard that they pay much higher rates than people typically get in these jobs. And so I think for an industry that has historically needed a lot of work, I think there will be people willing to work on these projects and then we’ll hear little pockets of dissent and resistance, which again is newsworthy, relevant, and there’s no one, but I still think they can employ thousands and thousands of people. I would also say that at the corporate level, while we’re starting to see more opposition, more outright opposition from corporate employees in terms of what their companies are doing, it’s still at a much lower level than it was around 2018.