AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser · 2026-07-02 · 50 min
What happens when AI stops being just a software story and starts showing up in towns, power grids, zoning fights, data centers, and business workflows? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Sharon Goldman, longtime AI journalist (most recently senior reporter at Fortune) who’s now the founder of Ground Level AI, which focuses on the real-world impact of the AI boom: infrastructure, data centers, cybersecurity, enterprise adoption, policy, geopolitics, and the communities affected by it all. We dig into Sharon’s reporting on AI data centers across the United States, including communities in Arizona, Louisiana, Michigan, and Texas that are grappling with new development, construction chaos, zoning disputes, water and electricity concerns, noise, jobs, tax revenue, and a larger sense that AI is arriving faster than people expected. We also talk about why data centers have become a proxy for broader AI anxiety, and why the conversation often gets more complicated than a simple pro-AI or anti-AI split. Then we turn to the fast-moving world of frontier models, cybersecurity, and enterprise AI.
Are You Subsidizing AI Data Centers?, w/ Ari Peskoe97 / 100The Case for Merging Brains and AI to Save Humanity, w/ D. Scott Phoenix72 / 100Why Businesses Need to Become AI-First, w/ Kevin SuraceThe Real Risks of AI and Nuclear War, w/ Ankit Panda & Andrew ReddieWhy Google DeepMind Is Using EVE Online to Train AI, w/ CEO Hilmar Pétursson