Thursday, November 5, 2026 · 5 min read
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Americans voted on AI data centres in 41 local ballot measures on Tuesday and sided against them in 40. Meta's own president says building just got harder.
Apple has put its engineers on an AI budget, and it keeps shrinking.
Let Meerkat explain.
Voters say no to data centres
Apple puts its engineers on an AI allowance
The interest rate under the AI build
Today's vote, Friday's jobs report and Nvidia's results date
SCOREBOARD
NVIDIA | MICROSOFT | ALPHABET |
META | AMAZON | ORACLE |
S&P 500 | NASDAQ | VIX |
Wednesday close. S&P up 1.6%, Nasdaq up 1.4%. On the week: Nvidia −7.1%, S&P −0.7%, Nasdaq −3.1%. The biggest cloud firms rallied after the election while Nvidia slipped (CNBC).
ON WATCH
Voters turn on data centres
Voters faced 41 local ballot measures about AI data centres on Tuesday and sided against the data centres in 40, CNBC reports. Almost 80% told NBC's exit poll they don't want one built in their own neighbourhood.
Democrats who proposed pausing new data centres won the governor's races in Texas, Georgia and Ohio, analysts told CNBC. In Ohio, the county where Meta had planned a 700,000-square-foot site has just passed a ban, TechCrunch reports.
Meta's president, Dina Powell McCormick, told a Wall Street Journal conference on Wednesday that the results will make building data centres harder. She said Meta is more optimistic about growing the ones it already has.
Smaller AI cloud firms, which often rent the buildings they run in, took the hit. CoreWeave fell 10% on Wednesday, and Baird called the vote a "sentiment headwind" for that whole group.
That said, tougher rules mostly change who does the building. Needham's Laura Martin argues higher barriers entrench incumbents, the giants that already hold land, power deals and permits (Governing has the ballot detail).
MEERKAT'S TAKE: For two years the fight over AI was about chatbots and jobs. On Tuesday voters made it about the field at the end of their road, and that's a much harder argument for a tech company to win.
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THE MACHINE
Apple rations the AI
Apple has cut how much its engineers can spend on AI tools each day, from $300 to $200, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, per TechCrunch. Some teams are heading for $100 a day, and staff outside engineering may get as little as $25.
Let Meerkat translate. Every question an engineer asks an AI model is billed in tokens, the small chunks of text the providers charge by.
Earlier this year companies pushed staff to use AI as much as possible, TechCrunch notes, and then the bills arrived. Critics keep pointing at the gap between what AI costs to run and the work it actually saves.
The bull case is that Apple is still spending heavily. Even at $200 a day, an Apple engineer can spend more on AI in a day than Anthropic's top Claude plan, Ultra, costs in a month.
QUICK PAUSE. WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? If your employer pays for AI tools, Apple has just shown how fast that budget can shrink. Outside engineering, its staff may soon get $25 a day.
SOMEONE SMART SAID
i want you to have so much ram lets build more
Altman renamed himself "Ram Altman" on X on Wednesday, after a week of backlash over a podcast where he called the memory sitting in people's PCs "quite terrible" when AI needs it. Elon Musk replied that "the people deserve to have their RAM too".
His point, he says, was that the world should make more memory, not that you should have less. But OpenAI is one of the biggest buyers: its 2025 deals with Samsung and SK Hynix were for up to 900,000 memory wafers a month, around 40% of world output.
Memory makers have been steering factories towards the AI chips that pay best, and PCs, laptops and games consoles have got pricier as memory costs climb. Whatever he meant, the shortage shows up in the price of your next laptop.
THE CHART
The rate under the AI build
US 10-year Treasury yield, monthly, 2000 to 3 Nov 2026 (FRED DGS10)
This is the yield on America's 10-year government bond, the base rate most big loans are priced from, data-centre debt included. It went past 5% in September and closed at 4.95% on Tuesday, up from about 4.2% at the start of the year.
That matters because plenty of the AI build runs on borrowed money, and that borrowing is priced off this line. It slipped to around 4.9% on Wednesday after the election, CNBC reports.
The other side of it is that the biggest builders can cover much of the bill from their own cash. CNBC notes the giant cloud firms pair their huge spending with strong free cash flow, and they have the most experience building these sites.
WHAT TO WATCH: The 5% mark. Above it, every new data-centre loan costs more before a shovel goes in; back towards 4%, the borrowers get room to breathe.
HEADS UP
OpenAI's unreleased model built 948 hacks · In one run, OpenAI's pipeline turned Linux kernel bugs into 948 working root exploits for $1.2 million, about $1,279 each. Over 100 are already patched or staged.
Korea's chip stocks trip a circuit breaker · The Kospi fell as much as 5.2% on Thursday, pausing program trading, as investors dumped Samsung and SK Hynix after the US vote.
Anthropic pays a news outlet for the first time · Claude's election-night results came from the Associated Press, Adweek reports. OpenAI already has over a dozen licensing deals.
Google's drug-discovery AI wants $5 billion · Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs is in talks to raise about $5 billion at a $50 billion valuation, Bloomberg reports, without a drug yet tested in humans.
Qualcomm bets on data centres as phones slump · Smartphone sales are down about 20% on 2025, The Verge says, and Qualcomm expects around $650 million of data-centre revenue next quarter.
ON THE HORIZON
When (ET) | What |
|---|---|
Fri 6 Nov · 8:30am | October jobs report |
Tue 10 Nov · 8:30am | October consumer prices (CPI) |
Tue 17 Nov · after close | Nvidia results (EPS est. $2.49, Nasdaq) |
Wed 9 Dec · 2:00pm | Fed decision |
MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE
AI Data Centers Are Raising Your Electric Bill. An acre of farmland earns about $1,200 a year growing corn, or around $10 million with a data centre on it. Meerkat follows the wire to the two hidden auctions that set your power price. Watch on Meerkat Explains.
THE BURROW
Quick vote. Voters said no to data centres in 40 of 41 local ballots, per CNBC. Where should new ones go?
Voters said no to data centres in 40 of 41 local ballots. Where should new ones go?
Trivia. Intel's 1103, launched in 1970, was the first DRAM memory chip to sell in big numbers. How much could it hold? Answer's at the bottom of the email. No peeking.
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That's the lot for Thursday. Somewhere a town planning meeting just got a lot more crowded.
Got a friend still waiting for RAM prices to come down? Forward them this.
Meerkat is not a financial adviser, and nothing here is advice. Meerkat is a small animal with a whiteboard and a laptop on a $25 daily allowance. Please do not sue Meerkat.
TRIVIA ANSWER
1,024 bits, or 1 kilobit. That's 128 bytes, and a laptop with 16GB of memory holds more than a hundred million times as much (Wikipedia).