Genius Sports bets on data as the new sports asset class amid digital pushback

Genius Sports chief executive Mark Locke has told SportsPro that data, digital services and direct fan relationships are becoming the sports industry's next big asset class, in an interview published on 17 September. Locke said the company's revenue split is currently 60 per cent betting and 40 per cent media and he expects that ratio to flip "in the not too distant future".

Locke's pitch rests on a simple claim: falling media rights fees are forcing leagues and teams to find new income. "Consumption is moving away from broadcast," he said. "There is a change in how sport is funded [which has historically] been [through] media rights. It's an absolutely seismic, fundamental and incredibly fast shift."

That argument is now colliding with a much less friendly environment for the infrastructure such analytics depends on. On Wednesday, Senate Democrats blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act by a 57-to-43 vote, according to The Guardian. The bill would have required electric utilities to consider standards so that data centres pick up the cost of transmission, generation and distribution upgrades, rather than passing them to households and businesses.

Energy politics catch up with compute

Four Democrats, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and both Georgia senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, joined Republicans in support. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called the bill "toothless" and said: "Relying on 'self-regulation' is how we got into this mess." The House had approved the measure earlier in the month. The vote came ahead of the 3 November midterm elections, The Guardian reported, and was one of the last the Senate is expected to take before the chamber concludes work on Friday. Ohio Republican Jon Husted, who championed the bill, said: "It's clear that big tech should be paying their own way, not passing the cost on to local communities and states, and this bill does that."

In Europe, the same tension is playing out through a formal complaint. Lighthouse Reports, a Netherlands-based non-profit, filed a complaint under the Aarhus Convention accusing the European Commission of building a "wall of silence" about data centre energy consumption, POLITICO reported on 30 September. The complaint says EU policymakers are determined "to deny or deter access to, and obfuscate understanding of, how data centers are performing".

The Commission's own figures put Europe's data centre electricity use at 20.7 terawatt-hours in 2025, roughly what Croatia consumes, and more than 8 million cubic meters of water. That is a 26 per cent rise in electricity and 52 per cent in water from 2024, though POLITICO notes the totals come from incomplete data and are published only in aggregate. A 2024 law barred Brussels and EU capitals from disclosing information for individual data centres. The Aarhus committee meets in November to decide whether the complaint is admissible.

Protests from Cape Town to Kenya

South Africa has become one of the first coordinated fronts on the continent. Rest of World reported on 17 September that civil rights groups, including Cape Town-based Housing Assembly and UK non-profit Foxglove, filed a legal challenge in August against two data centres proposed by Equinix, and called for a moratorium on data centre expansion across the country.

Kashiefa Achmat, chairperson of Housing Assembly, said: "Our members know what it is to queue for water, to go without electricity, and to wait decades for decent housing. Now a massive data center is trying to jump the queue and take our land, water and energy." The groups say Equinix's proposed 174-megawatt Cape Town facilities would use over 4.4 billion litres of water annually, as much as 18,000 homes. Equinix told Rest of World that "sustainable design is not an afterthought for us; it is a starting point".

Similar concerns surround a proposed 1-gigawatt data centre in Kenya backed by G42 and Microsoft, which stalled in May partly over power needs, according to the same report. Rachel Adams of the Global Center on AI Governance told Rest of World the pushback reflects how visible the costs have become, warning that late disclosure "can create mistrust and play on the uneven power relationships between large tech providers and local communities".

For sports analytics firms, the calculus is less about ideology than physics. Genius Sports says its GeniusIQ platform analyses more than 240,000 sporting events a year, drawing on computer-vision data points captured on every athlete, official and ball. That is a compute-heavy pipeline, and its outputs, such as semi-automated offside technology, are only as good as the latency and bandwidth available.

The edge computing industry argues that problem is best solved locally rather than in hyperscale halls. In a SemiEngineering piece published on 1 October, Sathish Balasubramanian, head of product for EDA AI at Siemens EDA, described edge devices as everything from a watch tracking a heartbeat to the lidar on a car. "I would say cars in general are not edge devices," he said. "Edge devices are more like the lidar in the car." William Chen, product marketing group director for design IP at Cadence, said edge systems "operate at the point of physical interaction", and that raw sensor output must be processed locally to cut bandwidth and latency before it moves upstream.

None of this settles who pays. The UK's Palantir fight offers a preview of how quickly public patience can turn. More than 44,000 people have filed legal objections to the NHS Federated Data Platform, which runs on Palantir software, the Guardian reported on 30 September. The objections rely on article 21 of the UK GDPR. 38 Degrees, which coordinated the filings, said the "scale of this public backlash should be a huge wake-up call for the government".

The separate row over Meta's Muse agent, reported by Tom's Hardware on 30 September, points the same way. Journalist Jason Aten found the agent referencing a private Messages conversation it had not been granted permission to read, and identified a local Messages database syncing to row 187,462. Meta's response, from Meta Superintelligence Labs chief executive David Singleton, appeared to blame the user, according to the report.

Locke's bet, in other words, is not really on data. It is on whether leagues, broadcasters and their technology partners can keep public trust while consuming the resources that make the numbers move.