Ben Pouladian @benitoz: 30,000 people applied for fiber-technician jobs at Meta's $META data center in rural Louisiana. 30 got in. Talking to Jack Farley @JackFarley96 on The Monetary Matters Network, Pouladian points to Meta's Hyperion data center in Richland Parish as the counter-story to the political backlash hitting data centers elsewhere: local teachers are getting $50,000-a-year bonuses off the economic impact. He sets it against SemiAnalysis's forecast of 43 gigawatts of new US power capacity next year versus Brad Gerstner @altcap's more conservative 25-gigawatt base case, the gap towns are now blocking with reversed approvals. The local jobs story is real. It's also an exact count of how selective those jobs are: 30 hired out of 30,000 applicants. Every chip supplier betting on power arriving on schedule is exposed to the same politics that produced that ratio. Podcast Alpha covers the power-and-politics bottleneck sitting under every AI chip thesis. Source: The Monetary Matters Network -