The Server Farm Revolt

In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with the server farm revolt. Voters rejected data centers in 40 of 41 local ballot measures on November 3, and two days later the Nasdaq had its worst day since April 2025. Additionally, he covers Anthropic’s IPO filing, a made-to-order melanoma vaccine, the finest Mars dust yet, and how voting is like a Klein bottle.

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Full Summary

Ray Cochrane opens with Halloween. On Saturday, he went out in costume with Delaney, Zach, and Monique. Cochrane and Delaney went as a matching pair of Blue Man Group members, with blue face paint and drumsticks. The photos came out pretty hilarious, and he is still debating whether to share them.

He also owns up to the audio on the last episode, which he says was shot. That day, Cochrane spent five or six hours debugging the studio’s audio chain, and he hopes it is finally stable. One big problem was that his headphones didn’t match the exported file. The export came out far quieter than what he heard while recording.

Next, he plans to rewire the whole studio, hopefully this weekend, with masking tape labels on everything. Otherwise, life has settled into a slower pace, and he is loving it so far. Dinner that night was grilled venison, which he calls very tender.

All the audio work has also pulled him into how audio works under the hood. Lately, he has been playing with Rust and audio software while working through Rust in Action. Compared to other Rust books, he likes how well it leads readers along. So he recommends it to anyone curious about Rust.

Voters Turn on Data Centers

The lead story comes from CNBC, where MacKenzie Sigalos reported on November 4. Ballotpedia counted 41 local ballot measures about data centers in 10 states on November 3. In official results, data centers lost 40 of them. All 27 measures that set new limits passed, while voters turned down all 13 that would have approved projects.

Only Harwood, North Dakota went the other way. There, a proposal requiring expert review and a public hearing before big industrial projects failed 325 to 105. Ohio held 21 of the measures, and data centers lost every one. In Piqua, a ban went into the city charter with about 67 percent of the vote.

Piqua voters also recalled three officials who had backed the project. Voter Marty Pollock told Dayton’s WYSO the deal felt like it was done sneakily, under the radar. Cochrane said the voters did well to do their research, especially when leaders seem to work behind their backs with money on the table.

Data Centers in the Big Races

Data centers also came up in some big races. According to AP results, Democrat Gina Hinojosa beat Texas Governor Greg Abbott by about seven points. She had called for freezing new data centers until lawmakers write statewide rules. Meanwhile, in Ohio, Sherrod Brown unseated Senator Jon Husted after calling him “the face of data centers.”

Cochrane is careful not to credit those wins to data centers alone. Still, he sees the same sentiment against AI data centers nationwide.

An October poll by ABC News, The Washington Post and Ipsos found 72 percent of Americans don’t want a new one built in their own community. However, The Washington Post reported the issue still came in last of the five that NBC’s exit poll asked about. Cochrane makes a point of not conflating the two.

Power Bills and the PJM Auction

So why would a town vote against a building full of computers? Electricity comes first. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found US data centers used about 4.4 percent of the country’s power in 2023. By 2028, it projects 6.7 to 12 percent.

Much of the eastern US runs on a grid managed by an operator called PJM. Each year, PJM holds an auction that pays power plants to stay available, and that cost lands on household bills. By IEEFA’s count, the price jumped from about $29 to about $270 in one auction, then to about $329. Cochrane calls it a crazy jump, roughly 11 times the old price.

PJM’s independent market monitor blamed data centers for 63 percent of that first jump. At a town hall in Prince William County, Virginia, Connor Pike said his family’s bill had climbed to $180 a month. Meanwhile, Ohio regulators now require big new data centers to cover at least 85 percent of the cost of the power they reserve.

Water and Tax Breaks

Water is the second fight. Many data centers cool their servers by evaporating water, and a large one can go through about 5 million gallons a day. During a drought in Fayette County, Georgia, a data center campus took more than 29 million gallons through meters the county wasn’t billing. The company, QTS, paid a back bill and blamed a county meter error.

Tax breaks are the third complaint, and Good Jobs First counts more than 30 states offering them. Moreover, The Register reported Virginia gave up about $1.6 billion in sales tax in 2025 alone. Yet a typical data center there runs on about 50 full-time workers once built, after as many as 1,500 during construction. Cochrane admits he had never looked at it from the tax side before.

Supporters point to Loudoun County, Virginia. Data centers sit on about 4 percent of its commercial land, but ITIF says they cover about 38 percent of the county’s main budget. Even so, Cochrane asks whether that money is worth the strain on land, water, and power prices, which he sees as the wider effect.

Wall Street’s Worst Day in Months

On November 4, the day after the election, the Dow jumped about 1,570 points. According to Yahoo Finance, no day after a midterm had been that good since 1982. Then, on November 5, it all came undone. The Nasdaq closed down 5.5 percent, its worst day since April 2025, and NBC estimated $2.8 trillion in S&P 500 value vanished.

Chip stocks led the drop. The Philadelphia semiconductor index fell more than 12 percent, its worst day since March 2020. Nvidia fell about 9 percent, while AMD and Micron each lost about 17 percent. Neoclouds, the younger companies that rent out computing power, fell hard too, with IREN down about 17 percent.

Cochrane doesn’t expect the big AI companies to slow down. However, he thinks smaller ones will get pruned as investment tightens, and that might not be a bad thing. He also agrees with Ed Yardeni that the AI bubble hasn’t burst yet.

AMD had just reported record data center revenue of $8.5 billion. Still, Cochrane finds it concerning that the company leans on that business to compete with Nvidia.

More Votes on the Calendar

More votes are already scheduled. On December 1, Clarksville, Arkansas, decides whether to keep city deals for up to $55 billion in data center financing. Then, on December 15, Mandan, North Dakota, votes on banning data centers that draw 25 megawatts or more. Cochrane notes 25 megawatts may be a fairly low bar, and he wants to look into it further.

Meanwhile, the energy data firm Cleanview looked at states whose governors have paused new data centers or promised to. By its count, those states hold over 40 percent of the data center capacity planned in the US.

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Anthropic Files to Go Public on the Nasdaq

The headlines start with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot. On October 26, it said it had publicly filed an S-1 with the SEC, the paperwork that comes before an IPO. Its shares would trade on the Nasdaq as ANT. CNBC reported revenue of about $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, up from about $1.2 billion a year earlier.

An updated filing added about $17 billion for the third quarter alone. It also lists about $895 billion in spending commitments, nearly all of it for computing. That’s roughly seven times the cash and short-term investments Anthropic holds. Additionally, the risk section warns the company may never stay profitable, and that its fight with the Pentagon and the Trump administration could cost it revenue.

Cochrane thinks Anthropic made the right choice standing by its ethics in that fight, and he calls the backlash insane. Investors are split, and the Kalshi odds of a listing by November 30 fell from 84 to 60 percent in a single day. His advice to anyone thinking of buying in is simple: do your research.

Arm Explains What AI Agents Need From Chips

Arm laid out what AI agents need from computer chips in an explainer on its newsroom. Drawing on AI director Laurence Moroney, it breaks an agent’s job into four steps: figure out the goal, make a plan, act, then review. In Arm’s view, the chips, memory, software, and outside tools must all stay in step.

From an outside view, Gartner forecast in June 2025 that companies will drop more than 40 percent of their agentic AI projects before 2027. Cochrane can see why. As people hand more and more work streams to AI tools, he says, they lose track of what that work is doing. So he expects companies to refocus on their core products.

Arm also reported record quarterly revenue of $1.44 billion on November 4. However, Invesco reported its royalties rose only 8 percent, short of expectations, and the stock fell about 13 percent the next day. To Cochrane, that helps explain the drop, since Arm counts on royalties from AI data centers.

Amazon Builds One Front Door for Cloud Apps

Amazon Web Services announced ECS Gateway on October 20. ECS is Amazon’s service for running containers, apps packed with everything they need. Until now, teams built each app’s entrance by hand, with a load balancer, an HTTPS certificate, and firewall rules. With Gateway, an infrastructure team sets the rules once, and up to 25 apps can share one load balancer.

The Gateway itself is free, though customers still pay for load balancers and traffic. Cochrane sums it up as a reusable config, and a pretty cool one for anyone on AWS.

Meta Asks Small Business Owners About AI

Meta published a survey it paid for, run online by YouGov. Almost 4,000 small business owners answered across nine places in Asia and the Pacific. Of them, 84 percent said they use AI, and 76 percent said it made them more productive. However, those are answers, not measurements.

Meta’s own fine print says the results aren’t nationally representative, and PPC Land noted that Meta published no margin of error. By contrast, Singapore’s government found only about 23 percent of its small and midsize businesses had adopted AI in 2025.

Cochrane expects Meta to talk up its own survey. Still, he wishes it would publish place-by-place results with margins of error, which would help more than a list of AI’s upsides. He also believes Google offers a free AI course for anyone who wants training.

Google’s Classroom Game Has Kids Map a Brain

Google’s Polar Peaks is the third free game in its AI Quests series for middle schoolers, made with the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. Players imagine a character’s brain and trace its nerve cells to learn why it is losing memories. Along the way, they clean up messy data, train a model, and test it. Since there’s no chatbot or generative AI built in, Cochrane calls it pretty cool.

The game is modeled on Google’s work mapping connectomes, the full wiring diagrams of a nervous system. The biggest complete one maps a male fruit fly, with more than 166,000 neurons. A human brain, by comparison, has about 86 billion.

Meanwhile, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley sent Google’s CEO a letter about Gemini, which comes switched on by default on school devices. Cochrane says schools ought to turn that off, and he would be upset too.

Why Your Brain Is Wired Crosswise

Phys.org ran an essay by two University of Minnesota neuroscientists, Martin Wessendorf and Daniel Wang. It covers their new paper in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy. Much of the body’s wiring crosses over, which is why a stroke on one side shows up on the other. Smell and taste, however, don’t cross.

In the authors’ view, the senses that build a map of the space around you are the ones that cross. They trace that pattern back about 500 million years to the earliest animals with backbones. It’s a hypothesis built from published anatomy, and they suggest testing it with scans of ancient fish fossils. The paper also opens with a line from pitcher Bill Lee, which Cochrane calls a fire quote.

A Made-to-Order Melanoma Vaccine Passes Its Big Test

Science magazine’s Jocelyn Kaiser reported on a Merck and Moderna trial presented in Madrid on October 24. Each vaccine starts from the patient’s own tumor. Software picks up to 34 targets, which get written into one strand of mRNA. In the phase 3 trial of 1,137 adults, everyone got the drug Keytruda, and two-thirds also got the vaccine.

After about two years, the risk of the cancer returning or death was 42 percent lower with the vaccine. Cochrane clarifies what that means. About 82 percent of the vaccinated group were cancer-free at two years, compared with 70 percent without it. The vaccine isn’t approved anywhere yet, and the full paper is due in the New England Journal of Medicine on November 11.

Perseverance Finds the Finest Mars Dust Yet

Since landing in 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover has carried swatches of spacesuit material on a calibration plate. Over 1,645 Martian days, it checked the dust on them with PIXL, its X-ray instrument. Teflon is made of carbon and fluorine, which PIXL can’t detect. So any signal from the Teflon swatch had to be dust, which Cochrane calls a clever approach.

Scott VanBommel of Washington University in St. Louis led the study. It found ultrafine grains about 100 nanometers, the smallest dust measured on Mars.

VanBommel says the smallest grains pose the greatest challenge for life support systems. Still, he told Reuters that doesn’t make Mars too dangerous for humans. Cochrane finds it terrifying to imagine breathing in dust that fine.

Europe’s CRISTAL Ice Satellite Opens Its Wings

The European Space Agency reported that CRISTAL, the Copernicus Polar Ice and Snow Topography Altimeter, has passed a round of factory tests. Airbus finished building it in Friedrichshafen, Germany, in September, then unfolded its solar panels for the first time. Next, it will spend most of next year in environmental tests at ESA’s site in the Netherlands. Launch is planned for late 2027 or early 2028.

Its key instrument is a radar altimeter, which times radar echoes to measure the height of whatever lies below. Snow sitting on sea ice muddies that reading. So CRISTAL uses two radar frequencies that react differently to snow, which lets it measure snow depth too.

How Voting Is Like a Klein Bottle

With the midterms in mind, Quanta Magazine’s Alex Stone wrote about Condorcet’s paradox from 1785. When three voters rank three candidates in a loop, each candidate beats another two to one. As a result, nobody wins every matchup. Later, in 1951, Kenneth Arrow proved no ranked voting system can follow a short list of fairness rules every time.

A new paper led by Ori Livson of the University of Sydney uses topology to glue the possible rankings into a Klein bottle. That’s a closed surface with only one side, and in this model the paradox shows up as that one-sidedness. It’s a preprint, and it claims no new proof or better voting system. Cochrane points listeners to the article for the visuals, since he keeps images out of the deck for copyright reasons.

Fire Guts the Eagle’s Nest

Smithsonian Magazine’s Soumya Sagar reported that fire gutted the Eagle’s Nest, the Kehlsteinhaus, high in the Bavarian Alps. The fire started on the night of October 23. Nobody was inside, and police say the building is largely destroyed. Hitler’s aide Martin Bormann had it built in 1937 and 1938 with Nazi Party money.

Cochrane keeps this one short. He finds it more shocking that it wasn’t taken down long ago. A Nazi home burned down, he says, and we should be happy about it.

Cochrane wraps up with housekeeping. Listeners can become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider or email geeknews@gmail.com. He also points to the newsletter at geeknewscentral.com and modern podcast apps at podcastapps.com. Finally, he thanks GoDaddy for more than twenty years of keeping the show on the air.

Before signing off, he apologizes for the slide mix-ups during the show and promises a better flow. Hopefully, viewers will see an updated studio next time. He doesn’t plan to change much, since there’s a lot of history behind him, but the wiring must change.