WSJ tech columnist and author of How to AI, the no-nonsense guide to what AI actually is and how to actually use it, for the rest of us
Baltimore, MD
Joined March 2007
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Practically no one read this when I published it a couple of months ago but I'm going to immodestly propose that everyone who wants to build a data center or whose livelihood depends on them getting built should read it now:
wsj.com/tech/ai/data-center-…
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
🚨 In Meta's first public comments since the election, President Dina Powell McCormick said the midterm results will make building data centers harder and that the company will have an easier time expanding existing data centers.
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
“Aides said it was a waste of time to tell him to stop talking about the ballroom because he held several long meetings a week on the topic and enjoyed giving tours.”
Excellent read by @jdawsey1 @learyreports @lindsaywise on how Trump lost the midterms:
wsj.com/politics/policy/how-…
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
Musk had a bad day, but his social platform didn't. I wrote about it for @sfstandard sfstandard.com/2026/11/04/x-…
no doubt a demonstration of my ignorance on the subject but how much of the movement of staff from Anthropic to OpenAI is folks who vested at the former and are looking to double dip by getting their next pot of equity at the latter?
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
NEW
The Wall Street Journal reports that Republicans had planned on making New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party in an effort to paint Democrats as out of touch.
That plan was upended when Trump accepted Mamdani’s invitation to meet at Gracie Mansion.
House Republicans were “apoplectic,” and Speaker Mike Johnson later called the meeting an unforced error.
Full Story: on.wsj.com/4sFnWdQ
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
“In those final days before Election Day, Musk, in many ways, had become the face of what troubled voters: They said they were unhappy with the income inequality, rise of artificial intelligence and Big Tech’s influence on the White House.”
gl wsj.com/politics/elections/e…
Elon Musk’s Political Fortunes Run Into a Blue Wave wsj.com/politics/elections/e…
I don't think it's possible to overstate how much Twitter's size, speed and reward functions ruin the brains of whoever is culturally dominant on it at any given time - this all happened before, with a totally different group, before Musk took over
Paying attention to Bluesky is and has been for awhile a form of information arbitrage.
I think there will be alpha in it for a long time yet, because a lot of people on X aren't going to want to pay attention to a second platform / don't understand the norms there
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
I shadowed Talarico on the day he launched his Senate campaign for a story about the left’s new media playbook that emerged post-2024.
He devoted much of the day to interviews with former network anchors turned YouTubers and Dem operative Substackers to rally base $$, chats with creators, etc. That strategy continued through Election Day — a creator led new media program, the Jubilee town hall, working with Luminary (the Gen Z digi agency from Kamala HQ creators) — and is one all major 2028ers are embracing, not to mention the other Dems who flipped seats tonight.
Dem operatives & creators feel they still trail GOP counterparts, but the way their candidates engage with the ecosystem has still scaled and developed significantly since ‘24.
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
This will be held up as a victory for pollsters. I'd be careful on that. Good pollsters did well.
But what we see is that polling error is not one-sided, and that polls can undershoot Democrats. Feels like we saw a lot of herding from pollsters who couldn't believe their data.
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
Surreal to see @ossoff discussing catastrophic risk from AI in his victory speech.
Huge win for @ossoff, who is one of the most informed members of the Senate when it comes to AI risk.
I’ll never forget his incredible line: “Tech titans build bunkers while warning the artificial intelligence they're creating risks human extinction.”
Let's go!
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
Election Day special Odd Lots:
@tracyalloway and I talk to @NateSilver538 about polls, polling error, predictions, prediction markets, and why everything is pointing to Blue Wave podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Christopher Mims 🤌 retweeted
This is remarkable. Parts of Florida’s Space Coast have received up to *half a year’s worth of rain* in the last day and a half — as much as 27 inches in 36 hours, about 50% of an average year’s rainfall (radar estimate through 5 p.m. ET Monday).
The most extreme totals occurred in the stretch from Palm Bay to Valkaria.
What contributed to this:
• A deep flow of moisture from record-warm waters in the southwestern Atlantic
• Weak winds through the middle atmosphere, which kept storms slow-moving
• Background moisture levels boosted by a record El Niño, riding the tailwind of a warming climate
Wow. For the tech crowd: Desktop prices are up nearly 20%, and laptops are up more than 57%
An announcement that is as personal as professional:
18 months ago, we started collecting online prices in real time to track how Liberation Day tariffs were feeding into inflation.
A lot has happened since. The BLS commissioner was fired. The longest government shutdown in US history meant CPI wasn’t published for the first time. And the case for an independent measure of inflation became much stronger.
What started as a tariff inflation tracker has since grown into something much bigger:
The Bloomberg Price Project (BPP), our attempt to build the US CPI from the ground up using alternative data.
Today, BPP covers 87% of the CPI basket, across both goods and services (more new data will be added in coming weeks). Every month, we collect millions of prices from card transactions, e-commerce sites, grocery stores, pharmacies, rental listings, corporate data, Bloomberg Terminal market prices and government records. And more data are coming.
The payoff is detail. Official CPI data let you drill down to categories such as “uncooked beef steaks.” BPP goes much deeper — breaking the CPI basket into almost 700 line items, compared with roughly 200 in the official data.
Brought to you by: myself, Troy Durie, Daniel Ripperger-Suhler, Joshua Danial and Scott Johnson from across Bloomberg Economics.
Explore the Bloomberg Price Project at BECO MODELS BPP <GO>, or download the data at ECAN US BPI <GO>.
I believe the paywall on Bloomberg.com is coming down briefly so you can read this without a subscription (but you should subscribe!)
bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-…
"The results of 10 governors' races will help set the rules for 67.4 gigawatts of planned data centers — $2.5 trillion of AI infrastructure investment"
I wrote some of this here in @Axios axios.com/2026/10/31/data-ce…
