New ‘South Park’ Takes On Data Centers And The Billionaires Who Build Them

While President Trump was holding a press conference at the White House this morning and extolling the AI-related work of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, a promo for tomorrow night’s South Park episode dropped. It was less salutary.

Here’s the logline for Episode 6 of Season 29: “Butters is unhappy with the data centers that the billionaires are building in our backyards.”

The clip opens with an X-Pest exterminator guy ringing the doorbell at Butters’ home.

“I understand you’ve got some billionaires in your back yard,” he says.

“Yeah, there’s more of these stupid billionaires every day!” replies Butters.

The first image from the episode (see it above) shows Butters in what appears to be his back yard with the X-Pest exterminator guy, who has strapped on his tank of poison and has his sprayer wand at the ready.

The 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.

Among the biggest players in the data center land rush is, of course, Oracle CEO and Paramount-WBD deal financier Larry Ellison. South Park airs on Comedy Central, which is owned by Paramount. As in the past, the show’s creators are seemingly not afraid to bite the hand that feeds them.

Mark Ruffalo and others have decried the introduction of “really profoundly scary technology” into Hollywood and how AI might impact media outlets soon to be owned by Ellison and his son David.

“Larry is a classic Oligarch,” wrote Ruffalo. “They are crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.”

Paramount, for its part, responded by accusing Ruffalo of using “antisemitic tropes” in his argument, especially when linking the Ellisons’ studio acquisition to Oracle’s work with the Israeli military.