The Election Day Revolt That Threatens America's AI Boom | Hacker News Reader

The Election Day Revolt That Threatens America's AI Boom

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It's threatening the construction boom, but it's still mostly American companies that are benefiting from an AI buildout, no matter where it happens globally (with the exception of China).

Google announced yesterday that they are pouring an additional 15 billion USD into Malaysia for compute. ByteDance is also building there, through DayOne. If you think about it, there aren't many reasons against constructing AI inference capacity outside the US. You tend to have less local resistance and there are plenty of countries with sufficient grid robustness and internet backbones. Malaysia already has many datacenters so this isn't novel.

LLMs typically don't have high latency sensitivity since reasoning models came around, so you aren't forced to build them near users, and East Asia is seeing lots of adoption anyways.

So all in all, I think US legislators are overestimating their leverage here

> You tend to have less local resistance and there are plenty of countries with sufficient grid robustness and internet backbones.

What explains the reduced local resistance? Do Malaysian residents simply have less political power, or do Malaysian datacenters somehow solve the technical challenges that beget resistance in home countries?

IMO it mostly comes down to flexibility with regulations on powering data centers and infrastructure issues.

It's very expensive in the US to connect a new large data center to the grid - not just in money, but in time, so AI companies power them with gas turbines which really suck to live next to.

In these countries, it is much easier to build out the grid, so datacenters bring far fewer downsides while still being as profitable as they'd be in the US.

It doesn't hurt that local control over development is much weaker outside the Anglosphere.

Not about Malaysia specifically but this article from the Economist suggests that there is less resistance to AI outside of the rich world

https://www.economist.com/international/2026/10/22/the-surpr...

Maybe China hasn't yet spent enough money to foment "grassroots" movements against data centers in Malaysia?

Given the globally relevant character of AI, I would be very surprised if all the anti-AI sentiment on English language social networks was organic.

They make for great targets in foreign conflicts.

well, they have plenty of leverage, unless the technocrats want to try to run Argentina into the ground.

I am sort of an armchair observer so I am open to others thoughts and observations here. I am wondering what sort of economic impact the AI Boom will have. There is lots of money moving around, the construction will have a positive effect on GDP, and I do not really doubt that AI will have a long term effect on production in the general economy (likely positive). But are the amounts being spent now and the giant tax breaks really worth it?

There’s a lot of money moving into wells, not necessarily much moving in ways that’s everyman-liquid. I mean stock go up, so some people can maybe capture some of that value, but generally once these places are built (temporary construction business), they retain a dozen or less employees and tend to sit around being a burden on local resources.

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