Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

More from today's Falcon Heavy launch

Falcon Heavy launches @NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from pad 39A in Florida, beginning its more than three-month journey to its destination where it will generate never-before-seen photos of the universe

Should say that I personally still find the @Grok app more useful for some tasks than @Bot. Worth trying it out on super tough tasks if you haven’t in a while. apps.apple.com/app/id6670324…

As someone who hates driving and lives in LA, FSD has had a disproportionately positive impact on my quality of life. It’s basically Xanax for the 405.

SpaceX’s road to making humanity multiplanetary is really incredible when you see the milestones together - 2008 → Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit - 2010 → Falcon 9 completes its first flight - 2012 → Dragon becomes the first private spacecraft to visit the ISS - 2015 → Falcon 9 lands on land for the first time - 2016 → First Falcon 9 droneship landing - 2017 → First Falcon 9 booster reflight - 2018 → Falcon Heavy launches for the first time - 2020 → SpaceX returns human spaceflight to America - 2021 → Starship SN15 completes a successful high-altitude flight and landing - 2021 → Inspiration4 becomes the first all-civilian crew to orbit - 2022 → Starship and Super Heavy become a full stack - 2023 → First integrated Starship flight - 2024 → Super Heavy gets caught by the launch tower for the first time - 2025 → A Super Heavy booster flies for a second time - 2026 → Starship V3 and Raptor 3 take flight 18 years of relentless iteration. Falcon 1 → Falcon 9 → Dragon → Falcon Heavy → Starship. Each milestone solved another piece of the puzzle And the destination has stayed the same from the beginning: Make life multiplanetary

Grok Bot templates are the first widely available way to share knowledge work. A template is a collection of skills, memories, and plugins - you could even call it a 'blueprint' or a 'workflow' You can teach a bot about your domain and send it to someone as a link. This will fundamentally change how we work together. Here's how you can get started:

FULL INTERVIEW: Jen Kha says El Salvador gave every school free Grok and is deploying AI doctors. She says countries nobody expects are now outpacing America on adoption while America fights over data centers. @jkhamehl is a managing partner and head of global partnerships at @a16z. She joined @theojaffee and @sophiadew on announcement day for the $1.1B Machine Age Fund to walk through the thesis and break down why the physical layer under AI was uninvestable for 30 years and isn't anymore: 00:38 why the timing of this fund says everything about the cycle 02:40 following the nerd energy 02:59 software's eating the world, but AI already solved software 04:44 23% of all venture capital this year 06:09 SpaceX public, Anthropic and OpenAI next, and what that does to LPs 07:36 the partner who said they'd deploy the whole fund in six weeks 10:01 the president of Korea's first and only US stop was Silicon Valley 10:15 NVIDIA is bigger than every G7 country except the US 12:27 South Korea, El Salvador and the countries adopting AI faster than America 14:33 why she thinks the data center narrative got ahead of reality 16:31 under 2% of US electricians are trained on DC power 17:45 agents now use 5x the tokens humans do 19:24 why these founders are a throwback, and where they're spinning out from

Acquisition of signal confirmed for our @NASARoman telescope. We have spacecraft separation, and a last look at Roman, now flying on its own. go.nasa.gov/4chzg9c