The Journal's front-page feature Wednesday by Amrith Ramkumar, Katherine Blunt, and Lindsay Ellis lays out something every AI-exposed investor should be paying attention to: public opinion has turned hard against artificial intelligence, and it's turned faster than the industry expected.
Eric Schmidt, the former Chief Executive of Google, got booed at a University of Arizona commencement speech on Friday for telling graduates that the AI transformation will be "larger, faster and more consequential than what came before." That was the lighter end of the spectrum.
In April, a 20-year-old Texas man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman's San Francisco home. A few days earlier, someone fired 13 shots at the front door of an Indianapolis city councilman who had recently approved a data center, with a hand-written note under his doormat saying "NO DATA CENTERS." Two days later, a second note arrived saying something less printable.
Polls have been moving in the same direction for months. Parents are worried about AI and education. Workers are worried about job losses. Consumers resent energy-price increases tied to data-center demand. The protests have already swayed at least one local election.
None of this changes our positioning much, and the reason is structural. We're positioned in the infrastructure of AI — NVIDIA (NVDA), Broadcom (AVGO), Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), GE Vernova (GEV), Vertiv (VRT), Constellation Energy (CEG), CrowdStrike (CRWD), Palantir (PLTR). The capex cycle that supports these names is a corporate decision, not a consumer one. Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta (META), and Amazon (AMZN) will spend $600 billion in 2026 capex regardless of what poll respondents say about AI.
What is at risk is the consumer-facing AI multiple. OpenAI is about to go public. Anthropic is hiring — Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and ex-Tesla AI lead, joined their pretraining team this week. The wave of consumer AI apps coming behind those companies will have to navigate an audience that's now actively skeptical of the product.
That matters for IPO pricing. It matters for venture-capital exit multiples. It does not change the math on $600 billion of data-center capex.
The other angle worth tracking: utility politics. The Indianapolis story isn't isolated. Every data-center build is now a local political event. The names that win in this environment are the ones that can navigate utility regulators and local councils — which is exactly why the NextEra (NEE) and Dominion (D) deal happened. Bigger balance sheet, broader political footprint, more leverage with regulators.