iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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 · 14h

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 · 15h

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 · 19h

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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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

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

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 · 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

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 · 21/08/2026

Fascinating how this always happens. During the e-commerce boom, many tech companies skipped landlords altogether to invest in their own logistics assets. During the AI boom, tech companies are leaning into hard assets faster than many landlords are.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 21/08/2026

Are software job postings recovering? Slightly. Are they still well below their pre-COVID levels? Definitely.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 20/08/2026

How did you get hacked? Gradually, then suddenly. LLMs had a modest impact on cybersecurity. Until they didn’t.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 20/08/2026

Job disruption does not mean "collapse". More often, it means stagnation while everything else around you grows. The e-commerce boom did not "destroy" retail jobs. It just left them behind.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 20/08/2026

America is building A LOT of new energy production and storage. But it needs much more.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 19/08/2026

Everyone wants to work on/in a data center. Interest in these types of jobs is up more than 8X since 2022 on Indeed.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 19/08/2026

New business applications just exceeded their Covid high.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 18/08/2026

New type of bankruptcy asset: training data. Alphabet is paying millions to buy emails, operations data, and other useful content from the now-defunct Spirit airlines.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 17/08/2026

Big Tech's AI capex is equivalent to nearly 3 million median salaries.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 14/08/2026

"2024 might be very different from 2014... technological innovation might lead to dramatic growth in economic activity and corporate profits while simultaneously reducing overall demand for office space." — Rethinking Real Estate, 2019. Still kicking!

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 14/08/2026

Some companies are leaning HARD into AI. Among OpenAI customers, the top 10% of firms use 17x as many tokens as the typical firm. In some industries, the gap is as high as 32x.

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Dror Poleg @drorpoleg.com · 14/08/2026

Can inequality decrease and increase at the same time? Yes. Since 2020, the lowest-paid workers have seen the fastest real wage growth. But... hourly pay doesn't capture stock compensation and investment gains.

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