Are investors losing faith in Big Tech's infrastructure frenzy?

This year alone, the biggest tech companies plan to spend more than $600 billion on physical infrastructure — eclipsing the railroad boom, the interstate highway system, and the Apollo space program. But are investors starting to flinch? This week, we examine the negative market reaction to tech earnings. Is Wall Street reacting to the infrastructure bottlenecks that stand in the way of building at that scale? Or are they worried about the tech industry’s approach to solving them? Then we turn to one of the boldest responses to those bottlenecks: space-based data centers. After SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI, Elon Musk says orbital computing powered by solar could be imminent. We unpack the arguments for and against space-based data centers. Then we look at solar. Musk says Tesla plans to build 100 gigawatts of domestic solar manufacturing capacity. Tesla has launched a new panel and mounting system that it claims will reduce installation time by 30%. At the same time, a new poll from Trump’s chief pollster shows majority support for solar among GOP voters — especially when panels are made in America. Is there a vibe shift underway? Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026. Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

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Episoder(71)

The new reality for data centers: no easy answers

For 20 years, the blueprint for data centers was simple: find some land, get in line for power, and trust that the utility could deliver. Data centers and power infrastructure got built on separate tr...

2 Jul 34min

How APS dove head-first into AI [partner content]

AI is about far more than chatbots and copilots. For utilities, the bigger opportunity may be in applying purpose-built models to the operational data from smart meters, customer systems, weather, out...

30 Jun 20min

Is commercial fusion finally near?

For a half century, fusion has been a scientific story playing out in national labs, government research budgets, and peer-reviewed journals. Every so often, a bold claim captures the public's attenti...

26 Jun 59min

SpaceX’s IPO is an energy story

Depending on where you sit, SpaceX is either the greatest industrial company of our time, or a CapEx bonfire that requires a lot of imagination to justify. But either way, the company’s public debut ...

18 Jun 41min

America’s electricity rage is here

The anger and anxiety over electricity in America is palpable. You can see it in packed utility commission hearings, in protests against companies, and in furious reactions on social media. And you c...

12 Jun 49min

The biggest utility merger in US history?

First, it was a power bottleneck. Then a compute bottleneck. Now, as AI agents burn through tokens faster than anyone predicted, we're back in a compute shortage. Meanwhile, it's getting harder than e...

5 Jun 1h 1min

The climate messaging war returns. Does it matter if we can’t build?

A familiar debate is reemerging in US politics: is it helpful or damaging to talk about climate change? It broke into the open when the New York Times published an op-ed from Matthew Huber arguing th...

29 Mai 1h 7min

Crypto’s bare-knuckle politics come to climate

Last year, clean energy attracted double the investment of fossil fuels. It's now a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and the dominant source of new capacity in the US. And yet in the 2024 ele...

22 Mai 46min