{"id":910549,"date":"2026-09-30T03:36:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T03:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/910549\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T03:36:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T03:36:11","slug":"new-south-park-takes-on-data-centers-and-the-billionaires-who-build-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/910549\/","title":{"rendered":"New ‘South Park’ Takes On Data Centers And The Billionaires Who Build Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhile President Trump was holding a press conference at the White House this morning and extolling the AI-related work<\/a> of Meta\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>, SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk<\/a>, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei and a promo for Wednesday night\u2019s South Park<\/a> episode dropped. It was less salutary.<\/p>\n

\n\tHere\u2019s the logline for Episode 6 of Season 29: \u201cButters is unhappy with the data centers that the billionaires are building in our backyards.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe clip opens with an X-Pest exterminator guy ringing the doorbell at Butters\u2019 home.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI understand you\u2019ve got some billionaires in your backyard,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYeah, there\u2019s more of these stupid billionaires every day!\u201d replies Butters.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first image from the episode (see it above) shows Butters in what appears to be his backyard with the X-Pest exterminator guy, who has strapped on his tank of poison and has his sprayer wand at the ready.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThe topic of data centers is a hot one across the country and especially in Hollywood, where unions and workers worry about job displacement and writers and directors express concern over what it might do to their art.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong the biggest players<\/a> in the data center land rush is, of course, Oracle CEO and Paramount<\/a>-WBD deal financier Larry Ellison<\/a>. South Park airs on Comedy Central, which is owned by Paramount. As in the past, the show\u2019s creators are seemingly not afraid to bite the hand that feeds them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tMark Ruffalo and others have decried the introduction of \u201creally profoundly scary technology<\/a>\u201d into Hollywood and how AI might impact media outlets soon to be owned by Ellison and his son David. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLarry is a classic oligarch,\u201d wrote Ruffalo. \u201cThey are crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tParamount, for its part, responded by accusing Ruffalo of using \u201cantisemitic tropes<\/a>\u201d in his argument, especially when linking the Ellisons\u2019 studio acquisition to Oracle\u2019s work with the Israeli military.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While President Trump was holding a press conference at the White House this morning and extolling the AI-related…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":910550,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[194514,64,63,134,71890,14627,21300,427],"class_list":["post-910549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-artifical-intelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-larry-ellison","tag-paramount","tag-south-park","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910549\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}