In recent weeks, Republican US Senate candidate Michael Whatley has come under scrutiny for individual stock investments reported on his family’s financial disclosure form.
Last month, Cardinal & Pine reported that Whatley’s family owns at least $149,000 in Duke Energy stock as the company seeks to raise utility rates in North Carolina by around $15 per month by the summer of 2028.
North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton spoke at a press conference in downtown Raleigh near Duke Energy’s offices in the capital city. She said she has personally been affected by high power bills.
“ Mine was over $294 last month, and I promise you, I travel the state of North Carolina. I’m one person, who rents her house, and I live at home by myself. There’s nobody else there to turn on the light when I am not,” Clayton said. “ I cannot imagine what a family of four who have got kids at home, that maybe want to turn on the TV every single night, have as their electricity bill this month.”
A recent survey from the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters Foundation (NCLCVF) found that 80% of voters in the state reported their utility bills rising over the last year.
Concerns about data center conflicts of interest
Data center moratoriums are being debated across the state, with 47 local governments having adopted pauses on approving new data centers as of Sept. 9. The NCLCVF survey found North Carolinians oppose data centers by a margin of 48%-33%.
State Sen. Natalie Murdock (D-Durham, Chatham counties) criticized Whatley for his holdings in Duke Energy, as well as companies that are involved in the data center industry.
“ He has up to 1.6 million invested in data center companies,” Murdock said.
According to Whatley’s August financial disclosure report, his family has individual stock holdings in several companies invested in the building and expansion of data centers nationwide, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, and Apple.
“We’re calling on Michael Whatley to denounce the Duke Energy rate hikes and sell his data center investments,” Murdock said.
Whatley campaign spokesperson DJ Griffin has previously said that companies building data centers should pay the cost of construction and excess energy use.
“Michael Whatley’s standard is simple: data centers pay their own way, families pay nothing, and communities decide,” he said. “That means Big Tech builds or buys every megawatt it needs and covers every dime of the grid upgrades to deliver it, with zero costs shifted onto residential ratepayers.”
Clayton criticized Whatley for only speaking out against data centers after he launched his Senate bid.
“ When he decides to run for the US Senate, he […] has to be asked to give that information, instead of freely and openly going and addressing the public everywhere across North Carolina saying that we’ve got to take on data centers right now across this state,” she said.
Fears about rapid development of artificial intelligence
Camille Kauer, a Wake County resident who attended the press conference, has real concerns about the impact artificial intelligence could have across society and in the workforce.
“ We have rules and regulations for cars, for guns, for everything else. This needs to be regulated, too, now that we know how much damage it can cause,” Kauer told Cardinal & Pine.
Over the weekend, three of the leading AI executives—SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman—concurred that regulations and guardrails for the development of artificial intelligence were needed.
Their statements came just days after Jacob Coxon, an AI safety researcher who recently resigned from Anthropic, posted on X that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
The fears are primarily focused on the potential emergence of artificial superintelligence, a form of AI that could improve its own capabilities and surpass human intelligence.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” Coxon wrote.
Kauer, who has worked in the entertainment industry, says that the advancement of AI led to her losing her job, when her employer began requiring use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language model.
She believes that use of ChatGPT in her job eventually allowed her to be replaced.
“I had basically trained the AI model to replace me,” she said.
