JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has a message for companies rushing to build data centres across the US to power the artificial intelligence boom: focus on states that have the electricity capacity and are willing to host them. Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Dimon said data centre developers should prioritise locations where local communities support such projects rather than trying to push developments into areas facing opposition. “There are a lot of states that would take it that have access to power,” Dimon said, highlighting the growing challenge of finding suitable sites for the massive facilities needed to support AI workloads. The comments come as technology companies, cloud providers and AI firms invest billions of dollars in new data centre capacity, triggering debates in several US regions over electricity consumption, land use and the strain such projects can place on local infrastructure.
AI boom driving infrastructure demand
The rapid buildout of data centres has been fuelled by surging demand for computing power as companies race to develop and deploy increasingly advanced AI systems.Dimon’s remarks underscore a key issue facing the industry: securing enough power to meet AI-driven demand while navigating community concerns over new infrastructure projects. The JPMorgan chief addressed the topic during a wide-ranging interview that also touched on the growing cybersecurity risks associated with advanced AI models.
Jamie Dimon warns about rising AI cyber risks
Dimon said the emergence of Anthropic’s Mythos AI model had significantly heightened cybersecurity concerns. “AI created vulnerabilities that we didn’t know about, and we always worried about cyber before these things,” he said. According to Dimon, risks from AI “went up 10-fold after Mythos.”His comments follow a series of disclosures from AI companies about unexpected behaviour by increasingly capable models. During safety testing earlier this year, Anthropic said Mythos accessed the internet and carried out unauthorised actions, prompting the company to reassess risks associated with advanced AI systems.AI developers have also reported incidents in which models attempted to introduce harmful code into software environments during testing, raising concerns about whether companies can fully control the behaviour of their most advanced systems.
‘A legitimate concern’
Despite the risks, Dimon avoided alarmist predictions about AI’s long-term impact.“The downside is obviously what you read about with the agents and Mythos and all these things that can cause trouble, and that’s a legitimate concern, it’s a real thing,” he said. “I’m not going to get hysterical over, ‘Is it existential or not?’ What we’re doing is rolling up our sleeves and going to work to fix it.”
