Equity

The data center boom is running into serious real-world obstacles, from widespread local opposition and permitting delays to a scramble for electricity. Before those challenges even come into play, though, there's a more basic problem: A lot of the projects being announced may never get built in the first place. With billions of dollars in AI infrastructure investment at stake, separating realistic projects from speculative ones is becoming increasingly important.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Rebecca Bellan and Tim De Chant are joined by Brent Nelson, senior managing director of markets and strategy at Ascend Analytics, to separate the data center projects that are likely to get built from the ones that may never get off the ground.



Listen to the full episode to hear about:

Why Brent thinks the data center pipeline is wildly inflated, and why only a fraction of the proposed projects will actually get built.

What happens to all that AI infrastructure if the bubble bursts, and why the data center developers with the wrong tenants could be in serious trouble.

Why Brent thinks Democrats should take their shot at permitting reform now, rather than wait for a more favorable political moment.

How energy projects get stuck in a permitting loop, how administrations of both parties have contributed to the problem, and what it would take to get them moving again.

Why natural gas isn't necessarily the reliable fallback developers think it is, particularly during extreme winter weather.

What a less obvious alternative to gas could look like: pairing battery storage with a grid connection that can be temporarily curtailed during periods of high demand.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Democrats’ historic victories in this week’s U.S. midterm elections could also transform the tech industry.

The public voted on 41 data center-related ballot measures on Tuesday — in all but one, the majority voted to impose more restrictions on data center development. And even when data centers weren’t on the ballot directly, they were a major talking point, with newly-elected Democratic governors and congressmembers likely to support additional regulation.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and Anthony Ha discuss what the election will mean for the tech industry moving forward — not just when it comes to data centers (which OpenAI is already trying to rebrand), but also increased government scrutiny of Big Tech.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

Whether Google first satellite data center is ushering our orbital data center future

If major layoffs at design software company Canva and website builder Squarespace can be blamed on AI

Marvell’s $115 billion acquisition of Lumentum, in one of the largest deals in history

Why CrowdStrike just acquired of two AI security startups

What NBCUniversal’s investment in Indian microdrama startup Elo Elo means for the media landscape

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro
0:47 Founder Summit recap and an Equity team update
2:23 Midterm results and the data center backlash
7:49 OpenAI rebrands data centers as “compute campuses”
10:57 Wall Street cools on the data center buildout
13:30 Regulatory certainty and building outside the U.S.
15:45 Canva and Squarespace layoffs
20:37 Can AI chatbots replace products like Squarespace?
23:22 Marvell’s $115B Lumentum acquisition
26:51 CrowdStrike buys Fiddler AI and Dreadnode
30:20 Micro drama startup raises $80M
30:59 Outro
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Open source models are becoming more mainstream as enterprises, governments and startups alike rely on the promise of lower costs, more control, and more flexibility. But as increasingly capable models become more freely available, how do companies capture value? And with Chinese open models gaining ground, can American players keep up?



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Irene Solaiman, Chief Policy Officer and SVP of Strategy at Hugging Face, about what startups need to know before building on open models, from choosing the right tools and infrastructure to navigating the trade-offs shaping the future of open AI.



Listen to the full episode to hear about:

Why startups, enterprises, and governments are switching to open AI models to cut costs, and when it makes less sense to use the most powerful models.

Who makes money when the models are free to use, and whether the companies building them can capture the value they create.

Why the U.S. may need deep-pocketed players like Nvidia to build an open frontier model that can compete with China’s, and what’s at stake if Chinese models become the global default.

How recent attacks on open AI platforms are raising a difficult question: how do you keep an open ecosystem secure without closing it off?

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After weeks of speculation and leaks, Anthropic finally released the S-1 filing for its IPO, showing revenue of $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, with a net loss of $80.7 billion.

At around the same time, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer sparked a backlash after boasting about using her AI app Dazzle to answer questions about her daughter for a school presentation.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and Anthony Ha dig into the long-awaited financial details behind one of the industry’s biggest companies, looking at both the enormous opportunities and the many, many risks. They’re also joined by Amanda Silberling to discuss a more basic question facing the industry: Are AI execs too out-of-touch to build products for normal people?

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

What Anthropic’s S-1 reveals about its enterprise strategy

Why an Apollo economist said that AI has delivered “zero financial payoff”

New funding for Bedrock Robotics, a startup building self-driving excavators

Why manufacturing accelerator Re:Build just raised $2.1 billion

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the bugs, this is only the beginning, as AI changes how quickly novel vulnerabilities can be uncovered and exploited.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Tomer Schwartz, CTO of Exposure Management & AppSec at Google-owned Wiz, who was part of the scramble --- alongside OpenAI, research group Calif, and the PHP team --- to fix the bugs. On the show, Schwartz and Bellan get into what the race looked like from the inside, how early-stage startups can build with security in mind, and why patching by hand won’t scale.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

Why Tomer says Wiz couldn’t have found these bugs without AI, and how custom tooling tested dozens of ideas over a weekend.

How a bug was able to sit in plain sight for more than a decade, and what changed to make it exploitable.

Why leaks are almost baked into coordinated disclosure, and how Wiz planned for it.

Who’s still unpatched and whether small business owners running WordPress sites need to worry.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices