Wall Street Week · Oct 24, 2026 · 48m · 36m saved
With Blair Effron, Democratic fundraiser, Centerview Partners · Brandis Keynes-Roan, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University · Buddy Reiser, Executive Director of Economic Development, Loudoun County, Virginia · Mark Muro, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution · Adair Fox-Martin, CEO, Equinix · Arthur Mensch, Co-Founder, Mistral · Roxanne Varza, Director, Station F · Jacob Kierkegaard, Senior Fellow, Bruegel · Marcelo Garcia, Political Risk Consultant · Ricardo Marcos, CEO, Tecpetrol
Loudoun County, Virginia now pulls about 40% of its tax revenue from roughly 230 data centers, the cluster the industry calls Data Center Alley. Most communities that get approached about hosting a data center weigh the fight against it; Buddy Reiser, Executive Director of Economic Development for Loudoun County, Virginia, spent years recruiting the operators instead.
"We just launched a new high school last year, $144 million high school with all the bells and whistles... We think that this is a very livable community, and a lot of that is thanks to the tax revenue that we've been able to get from the commercial sector and the data centers."
Buddy joined Loudoun County as an economic developer right after the 2008 housing bust wiped out most of its tax base. He has spent the years since helping build the industry that now funds roughly 40% of the county's taxes. It is one of four segments host David Westin ran on the same episode of Wall Street Week, from Bloomberg Radio, alongside campaign finance, Europe's AI ambitions and Argentina's divided economy.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 48 minutes of audio, 12 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Senate races now cost $200 million or more, but Blair Effron says campaign spending has passed a "saturation point" where more money stops swinging votes
AI companies have become major political donors, and Brandis Keynes-Roan's data shows their giving is more bipartisan than tech money was a decade ago
Loudoun County, Virginia now draws 40% of its tax revenue from about 230 data centers, funding a $144 million high school
Brookings' Mark Muro says communities routinely underuse their negotiating leverage with data-center developers
Mistral says it is now the leading open-source AI provider for "sovereignty deployment," positioning itself against closed, centralized model providers
Europe's AI sector has plenty of early-stage funding but lags badly at late-stage capital, exits and cross-border deals, Roxanne Varza says
Argentina's economy has split into two tracks under President Javier Milei, with capital-intensive sectors growing at double-digit rates while labor-intensive ones have shed more than 250,000 jobs
1. Campaign costs hit a limit
Blair Effron, a longtime Democratic fundraiser at Centerview Partners, told host David Westin that the price of a competitive race has exploded in the week before the U.S. midterms.
Senate races now cost $200 million or more
"The cost of these races has gone up exponentially. A Senate race is going to be $200 million plus. A congressional race, which used to be $5 million, $10 and $15 million, easy to spend. And what I would say is that, believe it or not, the most money still comes from small-dollar donors." — Blair Effron
House races that used to cost $5 million to $15 million now run far higher too. Blair said small-dollar donors still supply the largest share of the money, even as the totals balloon.
The spending has passed a "saturation point"
"The amount of money being spent is so large that at some point there's a saturation point, like there is in anything. My bet is that for most of these races, the funding piece has gone past the saturation point, and it's going to come down to the talent of the candidate, and that's who voters are thinking about." — Blair Effron
Blair pointed to Michigan's 2026 Democratic Senate primary between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens, where a wide spending gap didn't translate into votes. Past that threshold, he said, a candidate's own talent decides the race more than the next dollar spent.
