2026-11-06 22:37:32
This week, I hosted the legendary Bill Gross, founder and chairman of Idealab, for a conversation with the Exponential View community about building businesses in the AI age.
Bill recently founded Idealab.ai, which uses AI to explore vast spaces of potential business ideas, evaluate them against real-world problems, and help founders pressure-test and refine them.
What stayed with me was his emphasis on iteration and speed. At Exponential View, we think about this a lot. AI can help generate ideas and handle more of the mechanics, but founders still need to listen to customers, exercise judgment, and adapt. Bill joked that he should have called his company “Iterate Lab.”
Slides from the session are available to Exponential View members below
2026-11-06 20:11:39
The market ran for cover after the Democrats won the midterms. More than $2.5 trillion was wiped off the Nasdaq as investors fled the picks-and-shovels part of the AI trade. The Democrats made it clear that artificial intelligence would now face the scrutiny we would expect most technologies to face. Some said it more forcefully.
Those concerns are around AI safety, its impact on labor markets, the concentration of power and, of course, the pushback on data centers.
The data center revolt could be the sanest thing to happen to the AI build-out this year. Voters in the US passed 43 of 44 local measures to slow data centers down. This isn’t the death knell of AI, but the price to make it better.
Hyperscalers will pay almost anything for speed, and the places willing to move faster will be in the driving seat. And they should turn that leverage into lasting benefits for their communities.
Data centers were not why the vote went the way it did. The war, the cost of living, and gas prices did more, according to JD Vance. But data centers were on the ballot, and they lost almost everywhere.
Before the midterms, I said on ’s podcast and on Ezra Klein’s show that this revolt against these suburban monoliths was genuine democratic engagement: on many issues, including about how AI is arriving in our lives.
Data centers had become less popular than ICE. Getting the wrong end of the voters’ ire is not a reason to stop building everywhere. It is a reason to strike a deal.
High energy prices don’t really matter. Taxes and levies don’t really matter. Time to energize does.
Data centers make tons of money. But to get the cash spigot opening, the data center needs to be a data center.
The most important thing for developers—especially hyperscalers—is turning them on. So a pause on development hurts the best tenants, the hyperscalers, hard. Every B300 AI chip plugged in can make about $8 an hour, according to Silicon Data. It can pay for itself in less than a year. Every B300 sitting in a queue is simply lying idle, not yet adding to the depreciation bill but not paying its way either.
A 1 gigawatt data center of the type coming online now might have around 400,000 B300 chips. The total cost would hit about $40bn. But the annual operating expenditure is under 2.5% of the upfront CapEx bill for a 1GW site, roughly $800m a year. About two-thirds of that is the electricity. The shell might take just 18-24 months to build, while the average US wait time for a power connection is four years. Until the electrons flow, no money can flow. And that is an extraordinary point of leverage.
In Lanarkshire, on the outskirts of Glasgow, where Scotland’s 20th-century industrial heartland transitions to the rolling southern uplands, small towns built around UNESCO-heritage 18th-century cotton mills offer the Democrats a template to turn this into a win.
In this case, DataVita, the data center developer, has agreed to pay up to $100,000 per megawatt per year to a local fund for community initiatives like skills and training, education and food banks. When the data center reaches its 500MW capacity, this will mean a $50m-a-year fee. North Lanarkshire, the local council, has annual income of £1.17bn (or $1.58bn), so this is a 3% boost. Over the fifteen-year lifetime, it will run to up to £543m.
By comparison, Oracle sought residents’ approval for a data center in New Mexico, with nearly $1bn in new contracts to local businesses, $155m to offset utility costs, a $50m commitment to water facilities, and a $10,000 grant to a local sports team. But most of this Oracle needed to spend on building, rip that out and you end up at $205m in total. Compared to the Scottish deal, this was a miser’s bargain. Across the campus, it was $84,000 per megawatt, not per year, but as a one-off fee, nearly 18 times stingier than the Lanarkshire compact. If Oracle had met that benchmark, its 15-year bill to the community would have run to $3.5bn.
If the North Lanarkshire benchmark held, every GW of connection could yield $100m to a local community. Infrastructure companies can make $10 to $40 billion per gigawatt of energized AI compute. SpaceX’s surge deals with Anthropic and Google earn nearly $50bn per GW per year. There is plenty to go around. $100m per GW is 0.2% of what a gigawatt can rent for at today’s surge prices. At three or four times that, the levy is still under 1%.
Lanarkshire is a principle. US counties sitting on a four-year grid queue have more leverage. They should ask for more.
This isn’t to say locally negotiated levies are the only thing to aim for. Reducing energy and water bills clearly matters too.
So too does giving something to the local community when construction workers leave. The truth about data centers is that they don’t really employ anyone for every billion dollars sunk into the ground.
While Meta’s Louisiana data center investment grew five-fold to $50 billion, permanent staff numbers only doubled, to 1000. That’s around 20 people per billion spent. Anthropic’s $50bn of builds in New York and Texas will bring 800 permanent jobs. Sixteen people per billion dollars.
Transient construction workers don’t really create healthy, thriving communities—just watch Landman to see that.
But locally negotiated levies can create an annuity stream that communities can use to support local businesses, regenerate, and develop their own internal heat. Go back to Lanarkshire, where running the data center will likely employ 220 people. As part of the politically mediated agreement, the AI Growth Zone plans to create around 600 jobs for “AI researchers and coders”. As the chart below shows, this nudges that jobs-to-capital ratio up a little, but it's still far from modern manufacturing.
Smart data center policy can turn this revolt into a durable win for Democrats and their communities. Get the full playbook as a paid subscriber.
2026-11-04 01:33:44
Most of my ideas turn into sketches, research notes or brief videos for the team. Some of them finally make it into or .
But most — because of the time it takes to polish them — simply remain internal as tools to push our thinking forward.
We’ve been wondering just how valuable it would be for readers to peek at the artist’s sketchbook, even in its raw, unfiltered form.
The advantage is that you’d get to see things I think are important but, for whatever reason, we don’t finish or publish. Maybe they go out late, much, much later, or they don’t survive the cut.
These sketches are more raw than anything we’d normally publish. For example, it’s interim research I’m doing as I think through a thesis. I’ve judged it good enough for my thinking but not yet ready for your reading. But perhaps I’m wrong. Examples from the past week include:
An analysis of liquidity pauses over the past ten years that have hit the tech sector
How to classify high-quality research processes from degenerate ones
Co…
2026-11-02 23:41:38
Hi all,
Here’s the latest roundup of our data signals across AI, energy & markets.
In the AI Investment Brief today: October revenue updates plus a funding quality alert
Super, apparently. The US Census Bureau’s business survey now asks firms whether they use “Super Intelligence”. Its examples include voice recognition, which is not quite what Bostrom had in mind. 24.6% of firms said they use it in early October, up from 17.3% in late November 2025.
Not in my yard. Only 3% of political ads mentioning data centers in October supported them. 57% opposed them, and the remainder didn’t take a clear stance.
Chip nation. Semiconductor parts accounted for almost half of South Korea’s exports in October.
2026-11-01 11:54:37
Hi all,
Welcome to the Sunday edition. This week:
Is Anthropic a real business? We dissected Anthropic’s IPO pitch in 39 charts.
The new company: bigger, smaller, faster.
Sunrise in America
Also: New materials, GLP-1s & psychedelics++
We’ve just launched a new perk for members: EV Charts, a living library of 500+ data-rich charts on AI, energy, geopolitics and more, each linked to the original Exponential View analysis.
If you’re not yet a member, upgrade anytime for full access.
Every firm has its boundary. Back in 1937, Ronald Coase argued that the limit is defined at the point when the cost to do a task in the market is lower than doing it inside the firm. Most inventions- the ledger, telegraphy, copy paper, the internet- cut internal and external costs, so the boundary can move in both directions. Now, and colleagues ask what happens when we introduce AI agents in the mix.
Unlike humans, AI agents could share the same reasoning patterns (the model weights) and the same working state. Nothing leaks in handoffs from one agent to the next (and nothing is angling for a promotion). This might give rise to “supercooperative firms”, where bigger becomes better at every scale, possibly leading to giant AI-run firms in deep, large markets.
Arguably, this trend is long underway, as Kwon and others point out. The largest 1% of American firms held 97% of corporate assets in 2018.
AI might amplify this. AI-capable firms will be able to enter many markets, as Anthropic is in coding, bio, legal, and finance, and be able to scale horizontally past the traditional Coasian boundary. AI is a technology more likely than not to accentuate this trend. We might need new rules for dealing with such enormous entities.
See also: Microsoft is making way for the machines where I explore what be behind the tech company’s massive voluntary exit program.
2026-10-29 21:15:09
This week Microsoft offered a voluntary exit to around 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and India – about 27% of its 223,000 workers. Even vice presidents are within reach. This isn’t a round of layoffs, though it may be the prelude to one.
Is AI behind it?
That’s the usual reading. It comes in two versions. The first is that capital spending is heading to $170 billion, up from $23 billion five years ago; Microsoft needs to cut staff to pay for data centers. The second is that the company has become AI-pilled, and agentic loops are running rings around headcount. There is a more mundane explanation too. Like many tech firms, Microsoft hired hard during Covid; maybe now it needs to work off the bloat.
But none of these fit the facts. It’s no to Covid and not-yet for AI. That leaves one last rationale… the company is more productive than ever, and it is betting it can go much further.
Microsoft’s revenues and headcount have both grown tremendously over the past two decades. Since 2022, they have parted company.
Revenue growth has outpaced headcount for four years running. In the year to June, the gap was 20%, the widest on record.
The kind reading is that, like many tech companies, Microsoft carried Covid bloat and has spent the last four years working it off. Headcount has been flat, sales have ballooned.
The pesky facts get in the way. Covid hiring was real. Microsoft added 58,000 people in the two years to June 2022, almost exactly the size of this voluntary offer. But if that was bloat, it has long since been absorbed. Since 2023, the company has laid off 25,000 people and has had four years of no headcount growth. And the offer is not aimed at the Covid cohort. Engineers hired under Steve Ballmer’s tenure are as eligible as those hired painfully over Teams.
And whatever bloat there was, it didn’t stop margins from rising even as revenues strengthened. Revenue per employee is up two-thirds since 2022, to $1.5 million.
A firm with its healthiest margins in history is not carrying 60,000 unproductive passengers.
Offering a quarter of your staff the option to leave, with a severance package that costs real money, takes extraordinary confidence in how lean the business can run tomorrow.
What does Microsoft see coming that others don’t? In the rest of this post, I unpack the bigger bet behind its exit offer – and the signals that will tell us whether that bet is paying off.