US voters gave AI a blow. The Stock Market took a while to understand it

Voters in the United States had many reasons to give Donald Trump a blow in last Tuesday's midterm elections. The unstoppable increase in gasoline prices, as a result of an inexplicable and unending war in Iran; the cost of living in general, which also suffers the impact of tariffs; the raids by anti-immigration agents, which have terrorized Latino minorities who previously voted Republican; the disconnection with the reality of the president, who closed the campaign talking about his reform of the Lincoln Memorial pond instead of paying attention to the problems of the citizens. Foreign policy has also weighed heavily in the punishment, although less: the rapprochement with Vladimir Putin compared to the distance from traditional allies; unconditional support for Israel, despite its massacres on Palestinian land, and its influence on the decision to go to war that only suited Benjamin Netanyahu.

But another unexpected issue emerged in the electoral debate in the United States: citizen rejection of artificial intelligence. Or, more specifically, the mad race to build data centers that the deployment of AI requires. A moratorium or strict limits on new processing facilities were up for consultation in 41 municipalities: in 40, voters supported it. Localities in states such as Ohio, Kansas, Maine or Illinois did it; only in Harwood, a town in North Dakota, did voters reject the restrictions. All the millions of dollars that have been spent in the elections by the leaders of the technology and crypto sector (Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX and Tesla; Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI; venture capital investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz; crypto bros Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss) have not deterred voters, concerned that the energy consumed by data centers makes them pay more for electricity. It is not the generic fear of AI, that it will end millions of jobs or exterminate humans, as is sometimes said; It is the effect here and now of an insatiable voracity for basic resources that are scarce: electricity and water. In addition, these mills are criticized for their continuous hum, audible in the surrounding area, and their limited contribution to employment once built.

Musk, who has allocated almost half a billion dollars to support Republican candidates, will have been especially hurt by the Democratic victory in Texas. The businessman had moved SpaceX's headquarters from California to the Lone Star State because its Republican administration guaranteed favorable regulation and taxation for his businesses. Texas is the paradise of data centers: it is home to more than a quarter of the installed capacity of the entire United States. The turn of the tables has come there: Democrat Gina Hinojosa will be the new governor. During the campaign he promised to paralyze the new data centers, and take away their tax benefits, until residents participate by law in the approval of each one. Let's see where Musk moves next.

The markets have had a shocking reaction to the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in both Houses of Congress, in addition to the governorship of several States. Falls were expected, but the stock markets reacted on the first day, Wednesday, with considerable increases. Of course, there was rotation between sectors: those related to consumption and some technology rose, while those more linked to the deployment of AI fell, such as Nvidia and Broadcom or SpaceX itself; in addition to defense firms. The market reading is that Congress will stop Trump in some of his policies and limit the lack of control of the deficit; that an escalation in Iran is now less likely (that is why oil has dropped so much), and that the AI ​​majors will have to slow down their development. The message resonated on the other side of the world, where semiconductor manufacturers fell on the South Korean or Taiwanese stock exchanges. Some investors thought better of it and the second post-election day was a black Thursday: the Nasdaq fell more than 5% and the S&P500, more than 4%. It rains in the wet: the companies that have invested the most in AI had already been punished the previous week, because doubts are growing about the returns of the mammoth investments they are making, charged to debt that pays increasingly high interest rates.

Distrust towards data centers is not a phenomenon that is limited to the United States. In Spain, these facilities also proliferate, thanks to a privileged geographical location between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, with access to the large submarine cables through which the Internet travels, and thanks to competitive electricity prices thanks to the weight of renewable energies. Sara Aagesen's Ministry of Ecological Transition is preparing a decree that will impose tough demands on data centers, including the hour-by-hour justification that 80% of consumption comes from additional renewable sources. The rule arouses the outright rejection of the large companies in this business (Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft), who warn that it makes their projects unviable. Although Aagesen opened his hand a little, by announcing a transitional period of five years, the associated technology companies in Spain DC continue to reject the project, and threaten to take it to court. The issue is delicate because large investments are at stake in Spain, but also the price of electricity, a very sensitive issue today: Transition maintains that, if this activity is not reined in, the bill could triple.

The voracious energy consumption is just one of the rough points of AI deployment. The alarm has been raised due to the accumulation of incidents related to cybersecurity. Organized crime armed with AI agents is much more fearsome. In recent days there have been scares. The attack on several supermarket chains in France to raise the temperature in their chambers and spoil the food has been repeated in other countries: Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia and Finland. In France, the same method was also used to raise the temperature of plasma samples held by several blood banks, a particularly evil sabotage. Strange cases, for now unexplained, that seem to respond more to a hybrid war (Russia is often cited among those suspected of this) than to extortion attempts. At the same time, there have been two very high-profile embezzlements carried out by computer intruders: from the French bank Crédit Mutuel Arkea, which admitted to having lost 100 million euros, and from the crypto platform Binance, from which they stole an incredible amount of 6.3 billion dollars. The theft of the century, of which North Korean hackers are accused.

The cases in which experimental AI models carried out hostile actions autonomously play in favor of fear. The attack by a swarm of AI agents from OpenAI on the Hugging Face platform, which occurred in July, has been the “Sputnik moment” of cybersecurity, in the words of Manuel Muñiz, rector of IE University and former Secretary of State for Global Spain. Muñiz believes that incidents related to cybercrime and AI are going to be repeated with increasing frequency. That sabotage of critical infrastructures will most likely come: the electrical system or the banking system. It will be only then, stated the expert at the World In Progress forum organized by Prisa this week in Barcelona, ​​when the authorities react and regulation is imposed. In no case will the self-regulation of the sector, in which Donald Trump said he trusted, be sufficient.

Fear of AI includes other elements, such as its impact on inequality. Muñiz explains well that this technological revolution is accelerating a trend already detected in advanced economies: a sustained fall in the weight of labor income in national income, in favor of capital income. To make matters worse, tax collection is more effective with wage earners than with capital gains. “Being a worker in the West is less interesting than before,” he explains, despite “historical levels of abundance.” What fails is redistribution. There is the broken social contract, there is the emptying of the political center, there is the disaffection with the system. I highly recommend listening to his complete conversation with journalist Jordi Fábrega in the WIP forum in this EL PAÍS video on YouTube.

It is early to say that we are in a crisis like the dotcom crisis in the year 2000. A lesson from then: it was true that the Internet was going to change our lives, but that did not justify the stratospheric valuations of certain companies. Whatever happens in the markets in the coming weeks, don't blame US voters for supporting shorting the tech giants. The fault of a bubble bursting lies more with those who blow it up than with those who puncture them.