Bill Gates to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and every company building data centers: Americans will not accept data centers that are sold to them on…

Bill Gates has said something the rest of the AI industry would rather he had kept to himself. Some of the megacomplexes going up across the United States right now will not pay off. The electricity locked in will turn out to be too expensive. The compute will be undercut by cheaper builds overseas. The next chip generation will arrive before the last one has earned its keep. Gates said it on stage. And then he said the harder thing—no community is going to absorb a higher power bill so a hyperscaler can place a bet that may not even land.

“We don’t have permission to drive up people’s electricity costs,” he said.