The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
By Robert Cyran
NEW YORK, Dec 24 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The last bubble’s remains are always swept into the next one. Just look at a humble auto factory in Lordstown, Ohio: once a humming General Motors facility, then an electric-car plant, then a tech onshoring project, it has now transitioned to building data center gear. In this fictional podcast transcript, Breakingviews imagines the next step in the chain.
Perhaps OpenAI boss Sam Altman’s vision of reaping hundreds of billions in revenue is a mirage. Maybe a brilliant researcher figures out how to run artificial intelligence without quite so many servers. Or capital markets might just stop funding AI infrastructure.
Whatever the case, as the data center boom sputters, a plucky executive hits the interview circuit to push a new transformation.
Host: Hello listeners, and welcome back to The Big Spew, your direct line to the gargling maws of America’s entrepreneurs. Today we’ve got Cash Winbury in the studio.
Cash: Awesome to be here. I run PickleData, the nation’s premiere pickleball-themed sports-space-as-a-service company. We’re prepping an initial public offering, and we’ve got something no one else has.
Experience. Remember shopping malls? The exurban ghost towns that made the U.S. the world’s most over-retailed country? That bust left behind an empty-real-estate problem. Then came PickleMall.
Host: So you’re turning husks in the middle of nowhere into fake tennis courts?
Cash: First of all, we’re doing well more than that. We’re a tech company on the spinning rim of the sports flywheel. Second, pickleball is America’s fastest-growing sport. We only had one problem. Malls were too big – 800,000 square feet fits about 900 courts. That’s too many to fill.
But then I had a massive cognitive unlock. I rotated out of ayahuasca into regimented microdosing and went grind mode.
Host: And that was when you foresaw big data center projects like Stargate collapsing?
Cash: Yeah, that’s the story of 2026, right? But it wasn’t understood in 2025. Construction was up eightfold since 2019, everyone said we need everything for AI. There were signs. Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman mused that too many were being built. Amazon.com complained of power shortages even as projects elsewhere disappeared. And I thought: what happens when Icarus’s waxy wings melt? Well man, those are my courts.
AI guys in San Francisco hate it. They say I’m a decel. But I persevered.
We’ve still got learnings to process. Data centers might average only one-eighth a mall’s footprint, but too many are in Texas, not enough in New Jersey. And now that $600 billion of big tech spending isn’t crowding out little guys, they might try grabbing some cheap computing space.
But for now, we’ve got the mission – and the capital. After all, we just securitized our racket rental income.
Follow Robert Cyran on Bluesky.
This is a Reuters Breakingviews prediction for 2026.
US builds data centers at a frenzied pace https://www.reuters.com/graphics/BRV-BRV/zjvqdyrkopx/chart.png
U.S. retail square feet per capita peaked in 2010 https://www.reuters.com/graphics/BRV-BRV/egpbbqbynpq/chart.png
(Editing by Jonathan Guilford; Production by Oliver Taslic)
((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on CYRAN/robert.cyran@thomsonreuters.com))
