This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in tech by Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands.

It’s supposed to be frigid in Davos this time of year. Part of the charm is seeing the world’s elite tromp through the streets in respectable suits and snow boots. But this year it’s positively balmy, with highs in the mid 30s, or a little over 1°C. The current conditions when I flew out of New York were colder, and definitely snowier. I’m told this is due to something called a föhn, a dry warm wind that’s been blowing across the Alps. 

I’m no meteorologist, but it’s true that there is a lot of hot air here. 

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump arrived in Davos to address the assembly, and held forth for more than 90 minutes, weaving his way through remarks about the economy, Greenland, windmills, Switzerland, Rolexes, Venezuela, and drug prices. It was a talk lousy with gripes, grievances and outright falsehoods. 

One small example: Trump made a big deal of claiming that China, despite being the world leader in manufacturing windmill componentry, doesn’t actually use them for energy generation itself. In fact, it is the world leader in generation, as well. 

I did not get to watch this spectacle from the room itself. Sad! 

By the time I got to the Congress Hall where the address was taking place, there was already a massive scrum of people jostling to get in. 

I had just wrapped up moderating a panel on “the intelligent co-worker,” ie: AI agents in the workplace. I was really excited for this one as the speakers represented a diverse cross-section of the AI ecosystem. Christoph Schweizer, CEO of BCG had the macro strategic view; Enrique Lores, HP CEO, could speak to both hardware and large enterprises, Workera CEO Kian Katanforoosh has the inside view on workforce training and transformation, Manjul Shah CEO of Hippocratic AI addressed working in the high stakes field of healthcare, and Kate Kallot CEO of Amini AI gave perspective on the global south and Africa in particular. 

Interestingly, most of the panel shied away from using the term co-worker, and some even rejected the term agent. But the view they painted was definitely one of humans working alongside AI and augmenting what’s possible. Shah, for example, talked about having agents call 16,000 people in Texas during a heat wave to perform a health and safety check. It was a great discussion. You can watch the whole thing here. 

But by the time it let out, the push of people outside the Congress Hall was already too thick for me to get in. In fact I couldn’t even get into a nearby overflow room. I did make it into a third overflow room, but getting in meant navigating my way through a mass of people, so jammed in tight together that it reminded me of being at a Turnstile concert. 

The speech blew way past its allotted time, and I had to step out early to get to yet another discussion. Walking through the halls while Trump spoke was a truly surreal experience. He had truly captured the attention of the gathered global elite. I don’t think I saw a single person not starting at a laptop, or phone or iPad, all watching the same video. 

Trump is speaking again on Thursday in a previously unscheduled address to announce his Board of Peace. As is (I heard) Elon Musk. So it’s shaping up to be another big day for elite attention capture. 

I should say, though, there are elites, and then there are elites. And there are all sorts of ways of sorting out who is who. Your badge color is one of them. I have a white participant badge, because I was moderating panels. This gets you in pretty much anywhere and therefore is its own sort of status symbol. Where you are staying is another. I’m in Klosters, a neighboring town that’s a 40 minute train ride away from the Congress Centre. Not so elite. 

There are more subtle ways of status sorting, too. Yesterday I learned that when people ask if this is your first time at Davos, it’s sometimes meant as a way of trying to figure out how important you are. If you’re any kind of big deal, you’ve probably been coming for years. 

But the best one I’ve yet encountered happened when I made small talk with the woman sitting next to me as I changed back into my snow boots. It turned out that, like me, she lived in California–at least part time. “But I don’t think I’ll stay there much longer,” she said, “due to the new tax law.” This was just an ice cold flex. 

Because California’s newly proposed tax legislation? It only targets billionaires. 

Welcome to Davos.

This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in tech by Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands.

Hello from the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. I’ve been here for two days now, attending meetings, speaking on panels, and basically trying to talk to anyone I can. And as far as I can tell, the only things anyone wants to talk about are AI and Trump. 

Davos is physically defined by the Congress Center, where the official WEF sessions take place, and the Promenade, a street running through the center of the town lined with various “houses”—mostly retailers that are temporarily converted into meeting hubs for various corporate or national sponsors. So there is a Ukraine House, a Brazil House, Saudi House, and yes, a USA House (more on that tomorrow). There are a handful of media houses from the likes of CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. Some houses are devoted to specific topics; for example, there’s one for science and another for AI. 

But like everything else in 2026, the Promenade is dominated by tech companies. At one point I realized that literally everything I could see, in a spot where the road bends a bit, was a tech company house. Palantir, Workday, Infosys, Cloudflare, C3.ai. Maybe this should go without saying, but their presence, both in the houses and on the various stages and parties and platforms here at the World Economic Forum, really drove home to me how utterly and completely tech has captured the global economy. 

While the houses host events and serve as networking hubs, the big show is inside the Congress Center. On Tuesday morning, I kicked off my official Davos experience there by moderating a panel with the CEOs of Accenture, Aramco, Royal Philips, and Visa. The topic was scaling up AI within organizations. All of these leaders represented companies that have gone from pilot projects to large internal implementations. It was, for me, a fascinating conversation. You can watch the whole thing here, but my takeaway was that while there are plenty of stories about AI being overhyped (including from us), it is certainly having substantive effects at large companies.  

Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, for example, described how that company has found $3 billion to $5 billion in cost savings by improving the efficiency of its operations. Royal Philips CEO Roy Jakobs described how it was allowing health-care practitioners to spend more time with patients by doing things such as automated note-taking. (This really resonated with me, as my wife is a pediatrics nurse, and for decades now I’ve heard her talk about how much of her time is devoted to charting.) And Visa CEO Ryan McInerney talked about his company’s push into agentic commerce and the way that will play out for consumers, small businesses, and the global payments industry. 

To elaborate a little on that point, McInerney painted a picture of commerce where agents won’t just shop for things you ask them to, which will be basically step one, but will eventually be able to shop for things based on your preferences and previous spending patterns. This could be your regular grocery shopping, or even a vacation getaway. That’s going to require a lot of trust and authentication to protect both merchants and consumers, but it is clear that the steps into agentic commerce we saw in 2025 were just baby ones. There are much bigger ones coming for 2026. (Coincidentally, I had a discussion with a senior executive from Mastercard on Monday, who made several of the same points.) 

But the thing that really resonated with me from the panel was a comment from Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, who has a view not only of her own large org but across a spectrum of companies: “It’s hard to trust something until you understand it.” 

I felt that neatly summed up where we are as a society with AI. 

Clearly, other people feel the same. Before the official start of the conference I was at AI House for a panel. The place was packed. There was a consistent, massive line to get in, and once inside, I literally had to muscle my way through the crowd. Everyone wanted to get in. Everyone wanted to talk about AI. 

(A quick aside on what I was doing there: I sat on a panel called “Creativity and Identity in the Age of Memes and Deepfakes,” led by Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson; it featured the artist Emi Kusano, who works with AI, and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA, who has been at the center of a lot of the debates about AI in the film and gaming industries. I’m not going to spend much time describing it because I’m already running long, but it was a rip-roarer of a panel. Check it out.)

And, okay. Sigh. Donald Trump. 

The president is due here Wednesday, amid threats of seizing Greenland and fears that he’s about to permanently fracture the NATO alliance. While AI is all over the stages, Trump is dominating all the side conversations. There are lots of little jokes. Nervous laughter. Outright anger. Fear in the eyes. It’s wild. 

These conversations are also starting to spill out into the public. Just after my panel on Tuesday, I headed to a pavilion outside the main hall in the Congress Center. I saw someone coming down the stairs with a small entourage, who was suddenly mobbed by cameras and phones. 

Moments earlier in the same spot, the press had been surrounding David Beckham, shouting questions at him. So I was primed for it to be another celebrity—after all, captains of industry were everywhere you looked. I mean, I had just bumped into Eric Schmidt, who was literally standing in line in front of me at the coffee bar. Davos is weird. 

But in fact, it was Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who is increasingly seen as the leading voice of the Democratic opposition to President Trump, and a likely contender, or even front-runner, in the race to replace him. Because I live in San Francisco I’ve encountered Newsom many times, dating back to his early days as a city supervisor before he was even mayor. I’ve rarely, rarely, seen him quite so worked up as he was on Tuesday. 

Among other things, he called Trump a narcissist who follows “the law of the jungle, the rule of Don” and compared him to a T-Rex, saying, “You mate with him or he devours you.” And he was just as harsh on the world leaders, many of whom are gathered in Davos, calling them “pathetic” and saying he should have brought knee pads for them. 

Yikes.

There was more of this sentiment, if in more measured tones, from Canadian prime minister Mark Carney during his address at Davos. While I missed his remarks, they had people talking. “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he argued. 

Behold, the hyperscale data center! 

Massive structures, with thousands of specialized computer chips running in parallel to perform the complex calculations required by advanced AI models. A single facility can cover millions of square feet, built with millions of pounds of steel, aluminum, and concrete; feature hundreds of miles of wiring, connecting some hundreds of thousands of high-end GPU chips, and chewing through hundreds of megawatt-hours of electricity. These facilities run so hot from all that computing power that their cooling systems are triumphs of engineering complexity in themselves. But the star of the show are those chips with their advanced processors. A single chip in these vast arrays can cost upwards of $30,000. Racked together and working in concert, they process hundreds of thousands of tokens—the basic building blocks of an AI model—per second. Ooooomph. 

Given the incredible amounts of capital that the world’s biggest companies have been pouring into building data centers you can make the case (and many people have) that their construction is single-handedly propping up the US stock market and the economy. 

So important are they to our way of life that none other than the President of the United States himself, on his very first full day in office, stood side by side with the CEO of OpenAI to announce a $500 billion private investment in data center construction.

Truly, the hyperscale datacenter is a marvel of our age. A masterstroke of engineering across multiple disciplines. They are nothing short of a technological wonder. 

People hate them. 

People hate them in Virginia, which leads the nation in their construction. They hate them in Nevada, where they slurp up the state’s precious water. They hate them in Michigan, and Arizona, and South Dakota, where the good citizens of Sioux Falls hurled obscenities at their city councilmembers following a vote to permit a data center on the city’s northeastern side. They hate them all around the world, it’s true. But they really hate them in Georgia. 

So, let’s go to Georgia. The purplest of purple states. A state with both woke liberal cities and MAGA magnified suburbs and rural areas. The state of Stacey Abrams and Newt Gingrich. If there is one thing just about everyone there seemingly agrees on, it’s that they’ve had it with data centers. 

Last year, the state’s Public Service Commission election became unexpectedly tight, and wound up delivering a stunning upset to incumbent Republican commissioners. Although there were likely shades of national politics at play (voters favored Democrats in an election cycle where many things went that party’s way), the central issue was skyrocketing power bills. And that power bill inflation was oft-attributed to a data center building boom rivaled only by Virginia’s. 

This boom did not come out of the blue. At one point, Georgia wanted data centers. Or at least, its political leadership did. In 2018 the state’s General Assembly passed legislation that provided data centers with tax breaks for their computer systems and cooling infrastructure, more tax breaks for job creation, and even more tax breaks for property taxes. And then… boom!   

But things have not played out the way the Assembly and other elected officials may have expected. 

Journey with me now to Bolingbroke, Georgia. Not far outside of Atlanta, in Monroe County (population 27,954), county commissioners were considering rezoning 900 acres of land to make room for a new data center near the town of Bolingbroke (population 492). Data centers have been popping up all across the state, but especially in areas close to Atlanta. Public opinion is, often enough, irrelevant. In nearby Twiggs County, despite strong and organized opposition, officials decided to allow a 300-acre data center to move forward. But at a packed meeting to discuss the Bolingbroke plans, some 900 people showed up to voice near unanimous opposition to the proposed data center, according to Macon, Georgia’s The Telegraph. Seeing which way the wind had blown, the Monroe county commission shot it down in August last year. 

The would-be developers of the proposed site had claimed it would bring in millions of dollars for the county. That it would be hidden from view. That it would “uphold the highest environmental standards.” That it would bring jobs and prosperity. Yet still, people came gunning for it. 

Why!? Data centers have been around for years. So why does everyone hate them all of the sudden? 

What is it about these engineering marvels that will allow us to build AI that will cure all diseases, bring unprecedented prosperity, and even cheat death (if you believe what the AI sellers are selling) that so infuriates their prospective neighbors? 

There are some obvious reasons. First is just the speed and scale of their construction, which has had effects on power grids. No one likes to see their power bills go up. The rate hikes that so incensed Georgians come as monthly reminders that the eyesore in your backyard profits California billionaires at your expense, on your grid. In Wyoming, for example, a planned Meta data center will require more electricity than every household in the state, combined. To meet demand for power-hungry data centers, utilities are adding capacity to the grid. But although that added capacity may benefit tech companies, the cost is shared by local consumers. 

Similarly, there are environmental concerns. To meet their electricity needs, data centers often turn to dirty forms of energy. xAI, for example, famously threw a bunch of polluting methane-powered generators at its data center in Memphis. While nuclear energy is oft-bandied about as a greener solution, traditional plants can take a decade or more to build; even new and more nimble reactors will take years to come online. In addition, data centers often require massive amounts of water. But the amount can vary widely depending on the facility, and is often shrouded in secrecy. (A number of states are attempting to require facilities to disclose water usage.) 

A different type of environmental consequence of data centers is that they are noisy. A low, constant, machine hum. Not just sometimes, but always. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year. “A highway that never stops.” 

And as to the jobs they bring to communities. Well, I have some bad news there too. Once construction ends, they tend to employ very few people, especially for such resource-intensive facilities. 

These are all logical reasons to oppose data centers. But I suspect there is an additional, emotional one. And it echoes one we’ve heard before. 

More than a decade ago, the large tech firms of Silicon Valley began operating buses to ferry workers to their campuses from San Francisco and other Bay Area cities. Like data centers, these buses used shared resources such as public roads without, people felt, paying their fair share. Protests erupted. But while the protests were certainly about shared resource use, they were also about something much bigger. 

Tech companies, big and small, were transforming San Francisco. The early 2010s were a time of rapid gentrification in the city. And what’s more, the tech industry itself was transforming society. Smartphones were newly ubiquitous. The way we interacted with the world was fundamentally changing, and people were, for the most part, powerless to do anything about it. You couldn’t stop Google. 

But you could stop a Google bus. 

You could stand in front of it and block its path. You could yell at the people getting on it. You could yell at your elected officials and tell them to do something. And in San Francisco, people did. The buses were eventually regulated. 

The data center pushback has a similar vibe. AI, we are told, is transforming society. It is suddenly everywhere. Even if you opt not to use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, generative AI is  increasingly built into just about every app and service you likely use. People are worried AI will harvest jobs in the coming years. Or even kill us all. And for what? So far, the returns have certainly not lived up to the hype. 

You can’t stop Google. But maybe, just maybe, you can stop a Google data center. 

Then again, maybe not. The tech buses in San Francisco, though regulated, remain commonplace. And the city is more gentrified than ever. Meanwhile, in Monroe County, life goes on. In October, Google confirmed it had purchased 950 acres of land just off the interstate. It plans to build a data center there. 

The billionaire investor Peter Thiel (or maybe his ghostwriter) once said, “We were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

That quip originally appeared in a manifesto for Thiel’s venture fund in 2011. All good investment firms have a manifesto, right? This one argued for making bold bets on risky, world-changing technologies rather than chasing the tepid mundanity of social software startups. What followed, however, was a decade that got even more mundane. Messaging, ride hailing, house shares, grocery delivery, burrito taxis, chat, all manner of photo sharing, games, juice on demand, and Yo. Remember Yo? Yo, yo.

It was an era defined more by business model disruptions than by true breakthroughs—a time when the most ambitious, high-profile startup doing anything resembling real science-based innovation was … Theranos? The 2010s made it easy to become a cynic about the industry, to the point that tech skepticism has replaced techno-optimism in the zeitgeist. Many of the “disruptions” of the last 15 years were about coddling a certain set of young, moneyed San Franciscans more than improving the world. Sure, that industry created an obscene amount of wealth for a small number of individuals. But maybe no company should be as powerful as the tech giants whose tentacles seem to wrap around every aspect of our lives. 

Yet you can be sympathetic to the techlash and still fully buy into the idea that technology can be good. We really can build tools that make this planet healthier, more livable, more equitable, and just all-around better. 

In fact, some people have been doing just that. Amid all the nonsense of the teeny-­boomers, a number of fundamental, potentially world-changing technologies have been making quiet progress. Quantum computing. Intelligent machines. Carbon capture. Gene editing. Nuclear fusion. mRNA vaccines. Materials discovery. Humanoid robots. Atmospheric water harvesting. Robotaxis. And, yes, even flying cars—have you heard of an EVTOL? The acronym stands for “electric vertical takeoff and landing.” It’s a small electric vehicle that can lift off and return to Earth without a runway. Basically, a flying car. You can buy one. Right now. (Good luck!)

Jetsons stuff. It’s here. 

Every year, MIT Technology Review publishes a list of 10 technologies that we believe are poised to fundamentally alter the world. The shifts aren’t always positive (see, for example, our 2023 entry on cheap military drones, which continue to darken the skies over Ukraine). But for the most part, we’re talking about changes for the better: curing diseases, fighting climate change, living in space. I don’t know about you, but … seems pretty good to me?

As the saying goes, two things can be true. Technology can be a real and powerful force for good in the world, and it can also be just an enormous factory for hype, bullshit, and harmful ideas. We try to keep both of those things in mind. We try to approach our subject matter with curious skepticism. 

But every once in a while we also approach it with awe, and even wonder. Our problems are myriad and sometimes seem insurmountable. Hyperobjects within hyperobjects. But a century ago, people felt that way about growing enough food for a booming population and facing the threat of communicable diseases. Half a century ago, they felt that way about toxic pollution and a literal hole in the atmosphere. Tech bros are wrong about a lot, but their build-big manifestos make a good point: We can solve problems. We have to. And in the quieter, more deliberate parts of the future, we will.