The AI industry has now dug itself a hole. U.S. market analyst Daniel Niles said that after the midterm election results, over 40% of planned new data centers in the U.S. are now in jeopardy. Data centers have never been popular: they take up large amounts of land and consume massive amounts of electricity. To make matters worse, the AI sector has been loudly claiming that within one to five years, AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs—and even carry a 10% chance of destroying humanity. While AI threatens to take away your job, it’s also planning to build data centers near your home and consume your electricity. Once the election was over, this resentment turned into tangible resistance. Chip stocks took the first hit. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, which bundles companies like NVIDIA and AMD, dropped 12.1% last week, while the S&P 500 fell only 2.7%. Chips need data centers to be housed in—and new data centers are now much harder to build. Ironically, Amazon rose 7.9% during the same week. While new data centers are difficult to construct, the cloud giants’ existing facilities have become even more valuable. Niles says companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which focus solely on large models without any other business to fall back on, are in an even tougher position. And it was Anthropic’s own CEO who said, “AI will eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs.”