By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-06-10 04:26:00
Bill Gates does not usually line up with the protestors. So when the Microsoft co-founder went on CNBC and told the AI industry it has no permission to push up household power bills, the message carried weight the protestors themselves cannot deliver. The frenzy is real, he said. The economic value is real. The race against China is real. None of it overrides the basic political contract a hyperscaler signs when it walks into a town and asks for nine gigawatts. Get the siting wrong, the economics wrong, the residents wrong—the project does not get built.The industry has already learned this in cash. Forty-eight projects worth $156 billion were blocked or stalled in 2025, another twenty died in the first quarter of this year, and Kevin O’Leary’s Utah megacomplex was forced last week to halve its footprint from 40,000 acres to 20,000 after the state Senate president demanded a 75 percent cut.
