Meta warns that election backlash against data centers could make AI expansion harder

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1:39Meadow warns that election backlash against data centers could make AI expansion harder. I'm Imran Shaikh, and I'm here to make it easy for you to get your weekend crunch starting right now. The New York Times company has reportedly entered exclusive negotiations to acquire Letterboxd for$330 million, according to a report from the New York Times itself. Now, Letterboxd, an online platform for movie lovers that could be compared to Goodreads for movies, has grown dramatically in recent years. You see, Letterboxd reported 3 million users in January 2021, a figure that grew to 28 million by April of this year.

2:17More than half of its users are under 35. Letterboxd was previously reported to be seeking a new owner. According to the Times, film studios A24 and Sony were interested in the acquisition, but A24 was priced out. Letterboxd is free, but users can access advanced features with a paid subscription. Its projected earnings for this year are estimated at$15 million, which is only about 4.5 % of what the Times is supposedly offering to buy the company for. The New York Times company declined to comment on the acquisition to, well, its own paper. Personally, we wouldn't be surprised if these anonymous tips were coming from inside the house, so we're inclined to take this report pretty seriously.

3:02Amazon is jumping on the currently most popular bandwagon for interacting with AI agents, texting. The company on Friday said it's launching a feature that lets customers chat with its Alexa AI agent over text messages to help them shop, much like you can with AI agents like Muse or Instinct. The move comes after Amazon blocked Meta's Muse from querying its site in September. The company is rolling out the features just before the start of the holiday shopping season. The e-commerce giant said select U.S. customers will get a text asking them to enable the shopping feature. Those with access can text Alexa to shop on Amazon using natural language queries, spanning everything from searching for items, adding them to a cart, and purchasing.

3:45The text agent builds on the recent shopping-focused upgrades to Alexa and so can manage lists, keep tabs on prices, search for items across the web, compare products, and check the status of orders. Users can also share a picture of an item or someone wearing an outfit to search for similar listings on Amazon. The company said over time, Alexa will learn users' preferences and suggest items accordingly. The company said users who don't get invited to use this feature can sign up to a wait list. The feature will be rolled out more broadly in the coming weeks. Meta President Dina Powell-McCormick said that the Democratic wins in the midterm elections are going to make it a lot harder for companies to build data centers, adding that the industry has not done as good a job as they needed to explain the benefits of these investments.

4:33Speaking at the Wall Street Journal-Tech conference on Wednesday, the Meta exec pointed out that the backlash against data centers, which was very much on the ballot during the election season, was also tied to people's feelings about AI technology overall. The visible sort of manifestation of AI is a data center, and it's something that people can say, I don't want this in my community, she explained, continuing, I think there's an underlying bigger issue, which is how people feel about AI in general. Meta believes it could turn around the negative consumer sentiment around AI if it's able to demonstrate the value, not only of the data centers coming to local communities, but also in the technology itself.

5:12The exec also touted Meta's experience in building data centers, saying that the company has been doing so for 20 years, as it takes a lot of compute power to offer the products it does in the social networking space. Today, the company has data centers in 23 states, she said, and five of them, including one in Texas, are planned as projects of one gigawatt or more. But Meta is now worried that it could lose some of its investments after politicians ran on anti-data center platforms during the midterms. Specifically, communities only want data centers when it benefits them in some way, she explained, laying out the approach that Meta today uses to close its data center deals in local communities.

5:50Successful projects see Meta paying for its own electricity, directing any tax surpluses as a result of the data centers toward teachers and first responders, keeping the labor force local and getting bipartisan support for the project, among other things. Going forward, she expects data center projects to come under more review and be weighted against whether the constituents actually want them. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Ivan Mehta, Sarah Perez, Amanda Silberling, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here next week, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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