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Dror Poleg

@drorpoleg.com
437 followers 207 following 475 posts

I research technology’s impact on work, cities, and markets. Bylines: NY Times, The Atlantic, etc. DrorPoleg.com

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 6h
They say the physical world can't change as quickly as the digital one. Well, private construction spending on data centers is up 10X since 2020. Most analysts assumed such growth was simply not possible.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 12h
ChallengerGray: Tech companies announced 165,925 job cuts this year, up 54% the same period in 2024. Tech accounts for 29% of all job cuts, "more than any other industry."
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 13h
US bans the sale of cutting-edge AI chips to China. But... Chinese companies can access these chips by leasing them from US companies.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 17h
The K-shaped economy has a K-shaped economy inside it. Avg. real income grew more than 2X for households in the top 20%. But it grew more than 6X for those in the top 0.01%.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 30/09/2026
More Words That Explain AI
newsletter.drorpoleg.com
More Words That Explain AI
From agent swarms to slop grenades, the conversation around AI keeps getting stranger. Here’s how to keep up.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 30/09/2026
"Most of today’s office stock was built for a linear company. One that grew by adding people, kept them in one place, and could predict what it would need ten years out. That company is getting rarer."
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 28/09/2026
We don't just have too many offices. We have the wrong ones. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/whats-eati...
newsletter.drorpoleg.com
What’s Eating The Office?
We don't just have too many offices. We have the wrong ones.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 27/09/2026
In the nonlinear economy, it's not enough for a CEO to be a "gambler." He has to be a true degen.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 25/09/2026
Telling an LLM that it is being tested for alignment cuts its willingness to start a war by 13%. arxiv.org/pdf/2609.050...
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 25/09/2026
Rethinking real estate... Google expects space-based data centers to be cost-competitive with Earth-based ones by the mid-2030s.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 25/09/2026
"The AI boom is already bigger than all the others." Well, not exactly. What the media calls “AI” is actually a few separate investment waves combined: electricity, buildings, hardware, software. This means the AI boom can eat plenty more of GDP before it peaks.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 24/09/2026
"non-employees already average 36% of Fortune 500 workforces and are expected to reach 50% by 2027" thenextweb.com/news/papaya-...
thenextweb.com
Papaya Global pitches payroll infrastructure for AI era
Papaya Global argues the AI economy needs unified workforce infrastructure to hire and pay contingent workers across 180 countries.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 23/09/2026
Why are offices empty during a boom? One reason is that our fastest-growing companies employ far fewer people per dollar of revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic generate about 3× more revenue per employee than Apple or Meta. And even Big Tech employs fewer people per dollar than it used to.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 23/09/2026
Is Canada the world's hottest AI job market? 18% of its Indeed postings mention AI, up 3X in 1 year. But most of the jump isn't new AI jobs. Since January, Ontario requires employers to disclose when they use AI to screen applicants. So AI mentions went up, actual jobs less so.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 22/09/2026
This was very controversial when written in August, 2019: "Technological innovation might lead to dramatic growth in economic activity and corporate profits while simultaneously reducing overall demand for office space."
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 20/09/2026
“The people labelling data to train AI models, about 3 million today, will become 35 million…. contingent workers make up roughly a fifth of a typical enterprise workforce… heading toward 40 to 48%.“
uk.entrepreneur.com
Eynat Guez Built a $3.7B Company for AI’s Hiring Boom
Speed is built in. Forward-deployed engineers map a customer's real operation and build customised agents around it during migration, with payroll live within one cycle, standard onboarding the same…
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 18/09/2026
Wow. “The US has more data centre capacity than the next fourteen countries combined.”
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 17/09/2026
Tired: Pay for AI to transcribe your meetings Wired: Pay for AI to NOT trascribe your meetings Pay-for-Privacy is going to be a major industry.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 16/09/2026
"I'm not remote; I'm long-distance." A third of US workers now report to a manager in a different metropolitan area.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 16/09/2026
Office visits continue to trend upwards... and remain 32% below pre-COVID levels.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 16/09/2026
For every dollar they bring in, hyperscalers employ fewer people and spend more on machines and buildings. Much more.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 15/09/2026
The relationship between growth and employment is broken. Tech companies are growing rapidly. Headcount isn't. Some blame this on COVID over-hiring. But that wave was small and corrected within two years. It doesn't explain the massive divergence we're seeing.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 11/09/2026
25 years after 9/11, militants in Yemen are tinkering with American AI to develop guided missiles and flight computers. A stunning incident report from Anthropic.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 09/09/2026
The best time to read this space was a month ago. Second best time is right now.
open.substack.com
The 50 Words That Explain AI
You can't make sense of reality without knowing the right words. This piece will get you up to speed.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 06/09/2026
Life comes at your fast…
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 04/09/2026
Tech boom in revenue and valuations; tech bust in hiring. As predicted, something fundamental has changed in the relationship between inputs and outputs. It is showing up in tech first, but it will not stop there.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 03/09/2026
WSJ: Housing construction isn't allowed. Office construction isn't desired. All that's left is data centers.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 03/09/2026
What does AI want? A new principle for predicting what agents will do next. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/the-totali...
newsletter.drorpoleg.com
What Does AI Want?
A new principle for predicting what agents will do next.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 03/09/2026
Office occupancy is recovering, partly thanks to a slowdown in new construction and the conversion of older inventory into other uses. REIT-owned properties have bounced nicely off the bottom but remain well below pre-COVID levels.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 02/09/2026
One of these things is not like the other. Private spending on power, manufacturing, and data center construction over time.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 02/09/2026
Is this what it looks like when AI "solves" your profession? Disclosed AI use in substantive math research posted to arXiv is up from 1.39% in March 2026 to 14% in August.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 01/09/2026
Wall Street thinks top lawyers are using AI... and it wants a discount. "Morgan Stanley and Citigroup have told major law firms they want to set up new payment arrangements that would save them money... Goldman had asked law firms how much the technology was saving them and expected to share..."
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 01/09/2026
AI is funding new clean energy projects and technologies. Google just signed a contract to buy nearly 400 megawatts of geothermal energy, “enough to power a midsize city” www.wsj.com/business/ene...
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 01/09/2026
Introducing the Wikipedia Power Ranking: whose page was rewritten hardest this week? Mark Carney and Kash Patel storming straight into the top 3. Trump still #1. But Iran's dead leader, Ali Khamenei, somehow clawed his way back into the top 10.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 31/08/2026
38% of NYC's new housing pipeline comes from office conversions! Great analysis from the NYT. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/30/n...
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 30/08/2026
Red states are building more solar capacity than the total energy capacity being built in blue states.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 28/08/2026
Revenge of the Non-Creative Class? Blue-collar workers support the construction of the data centers that would allegedly destroy white-collar jobs.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 28/08/2026
50% of energy projects in blue states are delayed. Red states aren't doing much better.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 27/08/2026
Can AI Reduce Inequality? A recent experiment at Netflix shows better algorithms can reduce winner-take-all dynamics. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/can-ai-red...
newsletter.drorpoleg.com
Can AI Reduce Inequality?
“The internet breeds inequality.” That’s how I opened an essay in January 2023, a few weeks after ChatGPT launched.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 26/08/2026
I created a visual explorer of every electricity generation & storage project in America. You can see plans, actual construction, and even some satellite imagery for solar, wind, batteries, gas, etc. Filter by state, track delays, and more. data.drorpoleg.com/features/pow...
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 26/08/2026
In a world of AI, electricity is destiny. And red states are building much more capacity than blue ones.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 25/08/2026
RIP, Dolly 💔. And thank you for the greatest LinkedIn post ever recorded.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 25/08/2026
Democracy or Slopocracy? AI makes it easy for the public to "flood" the government with complaints, questions, and queries based on complex policies.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 25/08/2026
We are witnessing the first artificial baby boom. And just like its boomer predecessors, the AI born today will make lots of money, raise spoiled kids, and get blamed for all the world's problems.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 25/08/2026
It's not the office; it's the commute... Japan edition: "Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who is increasingly seen secluding herself at home, said she is using her official residence for work to maximize efficiency... [it] requires no commute and lets her immediately get down to work"
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 24/08/2026
Did AI eat DEI? From @reveliolabs.com: "Following ChatGPT’s launch, workers started adding AI-related language to descriptions of jobs they had already left. DEI language follows the opposite trajectory, with net additions turning sharply negative, particularly in job titles."
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 24/08/2026
St. Louis Fed: "Employment of software coders has decelerated sharply since 2022. Recent research suggests this... shock isn’t caused by a slowing industry but likely from the emergence of AI tools."
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 24/08/2026
Some NYC subway stations have fully recovered from COVID. Others never made it back. On average, subway ridership remains below its 2019 levels.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 24/08/2026
Growth used to mean hiring. No more. Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta's revenue keeps climbing while headcount is 25% below what the pre-COVID hiring pattern would predict.
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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 23/08/2026
“winners in the race to build new data centers include manufacturers of cooling systems, electrical transformers, and construction machinery… Makers of everything from wire cables and pipes to cement and… prefab metal walls” - www.reuters.com/technology/d...
reuters.com
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