Valuetainment - April 15, 2026


“The RAMageddon War” - AI Data Centers Causing Electricity Cost To SKYROCKET

Topics
chip prices skyrocket
Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
SK Hynex Ramageddon Oracle DDR5 Numbers Scream Brandon
＂World Cups Matter＂ - Ronaldo DISRESPECTED While Messi Takes #1 Spot on Sports Illustrated Ranking “Your Thoughts AREN’T Reality” - Sadhguru SHATTERS The Illusions Controlling Your Life

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

207.41

Word count

3,980

Sentence count

261

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the growing wealth gap between the wealthy and the poor, and how the Trump administration is to blame for this growing gap. We talk about how the financial system failed the middle class, and what we can do about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.040 Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.
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00:00:30.000 Americans on Wall Street, you look at the numbers, like, you know, the wealthy is getting wealthier.
00:00:36.400 It's not like they're being impacted by it.
00:00:38.120 You know, they're happy.
00:00:38.840 You're watching CNBC.
00:00:39.940 It's like, oh, let me tell you, I was wrong.
00:00:41.400 The market's doing great.
00:00:42.480 We just crossed.
00:00:43.380 So it's like, OK, the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting poor. 0.98
00:00:46.400 And the middle class is getting their asses handed to them. 0.97
00:00:48.160 Let me read some numbers here to you. 0.99
00:00:50.160 Americans are broke on paper.
00:00:52.860 Incomes can't keep up with prices.
00:00:54.620 This is a J.D. Power survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
00:00:58.120 And I want to share this with you.
00:00:58.940 This is for the Survey Monkey Quarterly Money Survey Q2 2026.
00:01:04.780 Here we go.
00:01:05.880 65% American consumers say prices are rising faster than their income per J.D. Power survey of 4,000 U.S. adults conducted February of 2026.
00:01:15.760 This is pre-war.
00:01:16.880 56% Americans say everyday life has become less affordable over the past year per the CNBC Survey Monkey Quarterly Money Survey.
00:01:25.680 Inflation in March 2026, 3.3 annualized, up from 2.4 in February.
00:01:30.520 Gasoline prices are up 21.2% in March alone for nearly three-quarters of entire inflation increase.
00:01:37.020 Real hourly earnings rose by only 1.4% over past year.
00:01:41.840 Prices are up 16% cumulatively over the past four years.
00:01:45.460 49% of Americans have reduced discretionary spending due to rising costs.
00:01:49.220 40% have dipped into their savings to cover daily expenses.
00:01:52.480 39% have used credit cards to pay for groceries or housing essentials.
00:01:56.120 30% are taking extra work, a side hustle or second job.
00:01:59.180 40% of buy now, pay later borrowers have paid late on at least one installment and loan in the past year,
00:02:05.280 up from 34% just two years ago, a 13% point jump per lending tree.
00:02:10.640 54% of buy now, pay later users say they couldn't make ends meet without these loans.
00:02:15.300 29% of buy now, pay later users are now using loans for groceries, up from 14%.
00:02:20.680 54% of Americans think the economy will decline over the next year.
00:02:24.880 Only 28% expect improvement.
00:02:27.000 And we saw a story that came out saying 40% of Americans have less than $500 in savings.
00:02:33.880 40% of Americans have less than $500 in cash in the bank, that number.
00:02:40.080 So, one, how did we get here?
00:02:41.880 You can't put it on this administration.
00:02:43.700 This has been built up for a while.
00:02:45.420 And how do you address it?
00:02:46.640 What do you do if you're going into midterms? 0.92
00:02:48.000 You're seeing a Mamdani winning, and I'll play the clip here in a minute about the free groceries. 0.95
00:02:53.160 It's going to only cost us $60 million to build seven of them, and now it's costing $30 million to build one of them.
00:02:58.860 But the average middle American is watching this message.
00:03:01.780 You're saying, hey, who's going to fix this?
00:03:03.320 Someone's got to fix this.
00:03:04.580 How do we address this?
00:03:06.080 Yeah, obviously a very difficult question.
00:03:07.600 I mean, this really has been building since the global financial crisis.
00:03:11.020 You know, we had the big financial implosion.
00:03:13.760 Banks were more supported than the average homeowner.
00:03:15.720 So we got, you know, the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, kind of the right and left flanks of kind of populism and pushback against what they perceived as a pretty corrupt system.
00:03:25.860 Throughout the 2010s, you had some rebuilding, but you had that kind of growing divide.
00:03:30.500 And, you know, under Trump administration, I mean, the first one, he did tax cuts that were primarily aimed at the wealth, even though we already kind of had that concentration.
00:03:39.020 And, you know, I think we're continuing this policy.
00:03:41.480 Even during COVID, you know, everyone kind of focuses on the STEMI checks and child care tax credits.
00:03:46.960 But the biggest, you know, bailouts went to the PPP loans that turn into grants for many wealthy business owners that weren't, you know, really planning on even laying off anyway.
00:03:54.780 There are people in the software industry or the, you know, investment industry that got big, big bailouts that didn't really need it.
00:04:01.800 Massive bailouts.
00:04:02.340 Massive bailouts and billions for certain corporations.
00:04:03.920 We had a board meeting that, Tom, you may remember this, where one of the board members like, hey, you know, we can get a few million dollars on a PPP.
00:04:11.740 I said, we just had our biggest month in the history of the company.
00:04:14.920 We don't need a single penny from PPP.
00:04:17.280 We refused to take it.
00:04:19.340 And we announced that we didn't take a single penny of it.
00:04:21.560 I cannot tell you how it was received by guys in the company because we didn't go take a single penny from anybody on the PPP.
00:04:26.800 And that's powerful because a lot of companies in that position that didn't need it, they weren't in a, you know, they're not like a restaurant.
00:04:33.160 They needed it.
00:04:33.980 Restaurants needed it.
00:04:34.560 Yeah, they needed it.
00:04:34.820 Those guys were getting crushed.
00:04:35.940 Exactly, but there are a lot of others.
00:04:37.740 I mean, I know software companies.
00:04:39.140 They basically said, if we don't take it, our competitors are going to take it,
00:04:42.080 and that's how they justify taking it.
00:04:43.840 Same thing with investment companies and just, you know,
00:04:46.020 companies that weren't really planning on laying anyone off.
00:04:48.140 So all that just drops to the bottom line to the owners,
00:04:50.820 which are, you know, on average pretty wealthy.
00:04:52.460 When you look at the whole kind of COVID stimulus,
00:04:54.660 it comes out to something like $50,000 per household.
00:04:58.080 And you say, you go to the average median household and you say,
00:05:00.720 I mean, did you get anywhere near $50,000 in support?
00:05:03.120 Of course not.
00:05:03.740 That diffused more opaquely through, unfortunately, kind of the higher end of the income stack.
00:05:09.880 And then since then, obviously, the inflation from all of that money printing has primarily impacted the lower two-thirds of the economy.
00:05:16.360 We're in a very firm K-shaped economy.
00:05:18.780 I mentioned consumer sentiment before.
00:05:20.520 Consumer sentiment's at record lows while the stock market is roughly at record highs.
00:05:24.800 That's pretty impressive, and the only time it was even close to that was kind of the late 70s.
00:05:28.720 um and so you know that that's that more stagflationary environment um i don't really
00:05:35.100 see relief anywhere on the way i mean i think obviously the the energy shortage is not helping
00:05:39.080 um i'm on the record not really viewing tariffs as being helpful because normally uh in this
00:05:44.700 type of environment over the past several years you had service costs going up that's where a lot
00:05:48.220 of the inflation was it was generally offset by lower goods prices um but over the past year or
00:05:53.460 so i mean the fed's done analysis of this cato institute's done analysis on this we've had
00:05:57.220 something like a 2% to 3% unusual boost in goods prices,
00:06:01.400 largely tradable to the tariffs.
00:06:03.740 So the median person's looking around and saying,
00:06:06.560 I thought this was America first, and we have wars,
00:06:09.800 we have energy shortages, higher goods prices.
00:06:13.720 There hasn't really been a lot of programs supporting them,
00:06:16.600 either with tax cuts or any sort of refinement.
00:06:19.620 Here's a question, Tom, and I'll come back to you guys as well,
00:06:23.040 but Tom, specifically you.
00:06:24.060 So is the solution to address this not winnable at the ballot, meaning to be able to fix this, there's no way in the world a person gets reelected if we wanted to find a way to fix this?
00:06:37.540 I think it's very difficult right now, but I'm going to go solution-based.
00:06:41.340 We've talked about all the numbers.
00:06:42.660 Don't need to go through them again.
00:06:43.740 There are two that I will mention quickly that are the most horrifying to me, and they're really horrifying.
00:06:49.120 It's $1.3 trillion in consumer credit card debt and the balance of BNPL loans, which were taken out because they didn't have enough credit card credit left.
00:06:57.900 And now seeing that 45%, as you pointed out in the stats, people, those are only supposed to be the average BNPL is 3.5 payments.
00:07:06.820 Remember, you bought the TV, $200, $200, $200, and now you paid for your $600 TV that you bought in September so you could watch college football.
00:07:14.560 Guess what?
00:07:15.560 45% have missed one, so that means it's 33% miss rate.
00:07:19.120 That's horrible.
00:07:20.340 So that is on the back of the consumer.
00:07:22.420 The consumer has more debt than everything else.
00:07:24.400 There is one category where the government and the president can come together and help at the ballot box, and it is oil and energy, excuse me, electricity and oil.
00:07:34.560 Oil meaning jet fuel to bring down air, fares, gasoline for your car, diesel, which is going to be shipping all those goods and services and Amazon Prime to your doorstep, diesel, and then heating oil for the northways.
00:07:48.000 We always forget about heating oil being such a critical part of the budget for people that live in the Northeast.
00:07:53.620 And praise God that we had a pretty mild winter this year.
00:07:56.200 Less heating oil per home was used this winter because it wasn't a severe winter in the Northeast.
00:08:01.980 Then you get down to gasoline, and guess what?
00:08:04.740 Natural gas, and there's a lot of natural gas that are in U.S. electric power plants.
00:08:10.580 This doesn't touch coal power plants.
00:08:12.400 But if you get oil and you get all of those things down in a hurry, you can help the consumer in all those categories.
00:08:18.880 And that helps them today in their budget.
00:08:21.400 How do you do with electricity, Tom, with all the AI data centers we're building?
00:08:24.460 I mean, when you look at the AI data centers numbers wise, do you know how many AI data centers we had 10 years ago in America?
00:08:31.720 Zero.
00:08:32.340 Zero.
00:08:33.040 You know how many we have right now?
00:08:34.460 4,000.
00:08:35.400 And we showed this stat yesterday of the ones that haven't been built yet.
00:08:39.260 1,500 of them.
00:08:40.400 Because people are now protesting and coming to City Hall, like we covered the Missouri protest.
00:08:45.640 Good citizens.
00:08:46.660 Six billion dollars.
00:08:47.480 Yep, exactly.
00:08:48.840 So that is part of it.
00:08:51.260 But wait a minute.
00:08:51.780 This is where I'm trying to go with you, Tom.
00:08:53.600 How do you fix the electricity issue when we've committed to build all these AI data centers?
00:08:58.980 The only state is that saying don't come and touch us as Maine.
00:09:01.620 You have already 1,500 of them that's going out.
00:09:04.380 You have Arizona that I believe they built a new plant, the TSMC plant.
00:09:08.980 What is it?
00:09:09.300 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company that they said was going to $11 billion project
00:09:14.320 became a $60 billion project.
00:09:15.920 Now it's $165 billion project in Arizona.
00:09:18.860 And then in Texas, I think Oracle, OpenAI, and one of the banks, it could have been SoftBank,
00:09:26.740 I don't know which one it is, they committed to an AI data center that's $100 billion that
00:09:32.080 they're thinking is going to go to half a trillion dollars all across the state of Texas
00:09:36.520 that they're building.
00:09:37.120 I think Microsoft is building one in Wisconsin for $7 billion.
00:09:40.820 And every place they go to, electricity prices goes up.
00:09:43.760 By the way, this whole Ramageddon war that you hear about, we've heard the Ramageddon, Ramageddon where.
00:09:49.580 AI chips, but then the basic memory chips, RAM chips.
00:09:52.620 That's right.
00:09:53.020 So the DDR5, which is the latest model RAMs that you consume are electronics.
00:09:58.100 You have it in your computer.
00:09:59.020 You have it in your PlayStation.
00:10:00.600 Those things that we would buy for $30, $40, prices have skyrocketed 200% to 300% to 700%.
00:10:06.120 700%, then they came out and built these new chips called the HBM chips, which is 15 to 20 times more effective than the DDR5.
00:10:16.220 And so these companies are sitting there saying, wait a minute, we need this stuff, bring it to us.
00:10:20.040 You know, 70% of all the chips now that they're producing is all going to the AI data centers, 70% of these chips.
00:10:27.420 10 years ago, that wasn't the case.
00:10:28.940 So these chip companies are like, wait a minute, priority, who do I sell it to first?
00:10:32.720 Do I sell it to cars?
00:10:33.920 Do I sell it to, you know, TVs?
00:10:35.960 Do I sell it to a PlayStation or do I sell it to a Sam Altman that went to what were the two companies?
00:10:42.840 Sam Altman went to Hynex.
00:10:45.440 Am I saying it properly?
00:10:46.840 What is the company?
00:10:48.240 SK Hynex.
00:10:48.560 SK Hynex, right?
00:10:49.480 If I'm saying it correctly, he goes to SK Hynex and one other company and he says to them, hey, I want to ramp up of needing this chips up to nine hundred thousand a month by twenty twenty nine.
00:11:01.800 And they're sitting there saying this is pretty amazing.
00:11:04.020 So it's a non-binding commitment he makes behind closed doors that's not public.
00:11:08.220 All of a sudden, it leaks last month to the world.
00:11:10.460 And now he's saying, I don't know if I want to do it or not, because the latest Google came out with a new project.
00:11:16.380 If you guys have been following the Google story that came out, it's called they wrote a paper just a couple of weeks ago.
00:11:23.060 Have you followed the story? I'm familiar with your talk.
00:11:25.920 Yeah. Google just came out with a project that they wrote out saying, hey, we don't have to buy these chips.
00:11:30.340 We can save 600 percent and make it more effective.
00:11:33.000 So some of these companies are sitting out there saying, hey, do I keep going through the TSMCs?
00:11:38.160 Do I keep the turbo quant redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression?
00:11:42.840 They leaked this.
00:11:43.940 So this changed Sam Altman's decision to kind of pump the gas, pump the brakes and say, do I go through these companies and buy these chips or not?
00:11:52.380 But here's the reality of it, where I'm going to.
00:11:54.800 And I want to kind of get your thoughts because this is what you guys follow closely.
00:11:59.280 So capitalism is capitalism.
00:12:01.840 Who's going to say no to massive orders?
00:12:04.380 Who's going to say no to $100 billion orders?
00:12:06.500 Who's going to say no to a $50 billion order commitment?
00:12:09.280 Your commitment is to your who?
00:12:10.540 To your shareholders.
00:12:11.860 Okay, so now let's go buy a bunch of lobbyists who are going to help us create these data centers,
00:12:17.540 who we can sell it as we're bringing jobs to a local community, 0.98
00:12:20.280 but the middle-income guys' electricity prices are not going.
00:12:23.300 We're not yet at a point with China that we have nuclear power.
00:12:25.940 We're still relying the old way of getting energy.
00:12:28.560 They're deciding to change the wafer that, by the way, the king of wafers is apparently Japan.
00:12:34.280 Japan makes most of these guys.
00:12:36.100 And, you know, these rams that they make it are two different ways because the DDR5s are kind of flat.
00:12:40.820 And apparently with the HPMs, you can build it up to 8 to 16 stack, go up like a very interesting when you look at the difference between the two.
00:12:49.860 But capitalism is not going to say no to that money.
00:12:52.440 So how are you going to control electricity prices?
00:12:55.620 The oil prices I get, stop the war, let's figure it out, let's get out of it, but how do you address the electricity prices?
00:13:02.320 Well, yes, I have it.
00:13:03.600 So the two things that I say, the president has his pen, and we can get oil and all those things we've talked about that have immediate economic benefit to an average consumer's budget.
00:13:12.860 Now, electricity, guess what?
00:13:15.060 On the demand side, it just happened, and I've been calling for it on a program that you put on, Valuetainment here, Numbers Scream.
00:13:23.460 We've been covering this, and we've been talking about the Rape Player Protection Pledge, RPP.
00:13:29.000 It was done by the White House on March 4th, and he wanted a pledge from people to go, just a Rape Player Protection Pledge, Rob, Whitehouse.gov, I sent you the link.
00:13:38.800 And they put that out as a pledge.
00:13:41.440 It needs to be not a pledge.
00:13:43.480 It needs to be legislation that says if you build a data center, you have to invest in the offsetting electricity needs.
00:13:53.760 You have to be part of that.
00:13:55.500 Oracle and Google went to the government and said, hey, will you support us, Gen 5, Gen 6, micro nukes that we will put right next to our data center?
00:14:05.340 And guess what?
00:14:05.880 In a natural disaster, tornado and everything, will we divert that power to the grid to help citizens?
00:14:12.060 So we will make our own power, and if there is any excess, we'll put it on the grid at times of need.
00:14:17.800 This is a rate player protection pledge, which was a PR event by the White House.
00:14:23.940 The reason I call it PR, it was positive PR trying to get everybody together to pledge we're going to keep electricity down.
00:14:29.500 Now turn this into legislation that says you're building a data center, then you have to build to offset the electricity so it doesn't affect the consumer.
00:14:37.500 Oh, Tom, you're talking about price controls.
00:14:39.260 No, I'm not.
00:14:39.880 I'm talking about supply of electricity.
00:14:41.520 These two things on the president's pen and all of this, now you go to the ballot box with a positive message of things that you can do.
00:14:50.980 Here's what you can't touch.
00:14:52.560 You're not going to bring down food.
00:14:54.000 You're not going to bring down milk.
00:14:55.260 You're not going to bring down a lot of things.
00:14:56.860 You're not going to bring on home insurance, car insurance, all those.
00:14:59.580 You're not going to touch those on the inflationary scale.
00:15:01.620 But you will touch this, and it will give you a fighting chance at the ballot box.
00:15:06.020 But the clouds are dark.
00:15:07.800 And that was your original question, was what do you do for the election? 0.92
00:15:10.860 Yeah, one of them, you have to stop the war.
00:15:13.860 The other one, you've got to go get capitalism to say you've got to help out the consumers as well locally.
00:15:17.680 Brandon?
00:15:18.480 Yeah, the biggest mistake he's making with this is acting like it doesn't exist.
00:15:22.120 I mean, it's an undeniable fact that people are getting crushed, especially the middle class.
00:15:25.920 You mean affordability?
00:15:26.900 Yeah, with affordability.
00:15:27.680 I mean, he's talking constantly about what his plans for the war, it's almost over, this and that.
00:15:32.840 But he keeps saying that inflation is gone, we got past it.
00:15:35.640 but the University of Michigan Consumer Consent Report was the worst of all time,
00:15:40.480 like worse than 2008, you know, that lines up with the $400 per person thing.
00:15:44.960 So, I mean, first thing is acknowledging it.
00:15:46.940 I think, like, that, like, even more so than the war,
00:15:49.280 the fact that he's going out saying inflation is dead,
00:15:51.740 I think that's his biggest pain point for the election.
00:15:54.600 And in terms of addressing it, I mean, the deficit spending,
00:15:57.600 I think that's what's propped up not just the stock market,
00:15:59.680 but inflation for the last, you know, 10, 20, 30 years.
00:16:02.620 when we got off the gold standard that enabled us to do the deficit spending and um i think like
00:16:07.740 why not invest like this excess money that we've been pumping into the military industrial complex
00:16:12.220 or pumping into the health care system or social security why haven't we been investing that in
00:16:16.480 the nuclear energy like we've built i think three nuclear reactors in the last 30 years in america
00:16:21.060 so you know we got you know unexpectedly hit with this massive demand for energy from the ai data
00:16:26.700 centers like we already were dealt in a delicate place from an energy demand standpoint but now
00:16:30.960 were caught off guard for it because we had this massive demand that we weren't expecting so i and
00:16:36.380 the thing about oil too is that when that gets cheaper i think that actually makes inflation go
00:16:39.980 up in some things because it gives people um excess disposable income so there's an argument
00:16:44.500 that could be made that oil going up might actually make inflation and other things go down
00:16:48.320 then uh yeah so i mean i think with the electricity issue we can kind of think of it like zoning more
00:16:53.980 so than price controls like much much like how residential and and you know industrial things are
00:16:57.880 generally separated at the local level. There can be, you know, these agreements, like all these
00:17:01.780 protests against data centers and stuff, and the local politicians decide and let that project
00:17:06.480 go forward. Now, a lot of that can include agreements about how they're going to secure
00:17:09.820 their own electricity, that when they build a data center, they also have to build an energy
00:17:12.820 infrastructure around it. So they don't just come in and double everyone's electricity prices
00:17:16.400 in the region and kind of benefit from the subsidies and other things that are already there.
00:17:20.620 I think that's a huge factor. A lot of the data center companies that I would consider best of
00:17:25.960 class their advantage because they've already secured a lot of their own energy infrastructure
00:17:29.740 many of them some of them were bitcoin miners before they've kind of shifted it's funny a lot
00:17:33.260 of people years ago were concerned about bitcoin miners coming in and driving up prices that was
00:17:37.560 never a very rational concern or at least over any sort of multi-year period because bitcoin miners
00:17:41.620 need super cheap electricity the problem with ai data centers is they actually can bid pretty high
00:17:46.820 prices for electricity they can they can outbid local retail buyers they also you know they want
00:17:51.700 pretty low latency so they want to generally be closer to population centers they don't want to
00:17:55.160 be out and out in the middle of nowhere like bitcoin miners are fine to being so i think
00:17:59.200 basically we are seeing uh this is a pretty real issue um i think getting energy prices down is is
00:18:04.420 one of the nearest term fixes here um you know the the more structural issues for how to make
00:18:09.720 things more affordable i think obviously tackling health care is a big area because the u.s spends
00:18:13.920 by far the most per capita on health care in the world uh without necessarily better outcomes in
00:18:18.940 many categories but that's not obvious that's not a multi-month issue that's more of like a second
00:18:23.240 half of term issue or, you know, the next administration, whoever that might be.
00:18:26.840 But I think that getting, you know, doing steps to kind of get health care costs down 0.79
00:18:30.740 is more structural, one of the big structural things for this kind of K-shaped economy. 0.91
00:18:33.820 But in the near term, it's more about putting out the fires.
00:18:36.280 It's more about putting out these immediate issues.
00:18:37.920 Rob, can you run a poll and ask the question, how much has your electricity bill increased?
00:18:43.520 And you can put, stay the same, up 10 to 20 percent, you know, maybe, what should the
00:18:51.300 tiers be?
00:18:52.340 What should the tiers be, Tom?
00:18:54.680 Up what?
00:18:55.580 Up 10 to 20 percent?
00:18:57.320 Yeah, I think you need to do under 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40.
00:19:04.420 Yeah, just put 30 plus.
00:19:06.160 Okay?
00:19:06.720 Under 10, you know, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 plus.
00:19:10.340 Curious to know how much that's happened.