Dan Shahin campaign photo.

Late last year, Dan Shahin was at the dais, addressing the five members of the Arcata City Council. He’d just launched an election campaign to join them less than two weeks prior, but he wasn’t there to deliver a stump speech. He was angry that the local government hadn’t had any public deliberations on the data center on 11th Street, and it saddened him that it had replaced a lumber store with dozens of employees. It was, he said, “a strange, pernicious, dangerous, alien presence,” and as he spoke, his focus drifted to Nvidia, a manufacturer of graphic processing units used to power the AI boom and the first company to ever surpass a $5 trillion market capitalization. By that metric, it is the most valuable company on the planet. 

“The company known as Nvidia that makes GPUs is worth two and a half times Canada,” he said. “Nvidia is, on paper, worth more than every pizza ever made in history. These numbers are ridiculous. They’re not realistic. They’re based on projections of income that are probably very unrealistic. We’re headed for economic crash, societal crash, not to mention the tremendous amounts of power and water this is draining.”

It was in character for Shahin. His campaign is heavy on increasing the supply of housing, and a large part of that, he’s said, is ensuring the environment isn’t affected. He’s pro-small business, pro-union — both of his parents were union members — he was once the CTO of a company that made software for union organizing. What’s less in character are his investments, detailed in an FPPC form he filed earlier this year: between $10,000 and $100,000 in Nvidia, the same for Amazon, a company infamous for union-busting and poor working conditions, as well as investments in Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Spotify, Costco, and ARM computer chips.

How can they co-exist? Many of those holdings came from his parents, he told the Outpost during a phone interview on Friday. His mom died in May before the race picked up, and he inherited their investments just in time to make disclosing them necessary. (They’re also barely over $10,000, he claimed.)

Shahin’s originally from San Jose. He was a computer engineer during the dot-com boom, bullish on the rapidly expanding internet. He encouraged his parents — and his wife’s parents, who, he said, also recently died and left their investments to them — to buy Amazon and Nvidia stock, “back when it was a video game chip company.” Nvidia stock went for less than a dollar a share back then, Amazon’s only a couple dollars more. Clearing more than $10,000 in investments in 2026 isn’t hard if you were prescient when you picked them close to three decades ago. Shahin suggested they only needed to buy one share of Amazon in 1997 to make more than $10,000 profit. (The actual number’ is a lot higher.) 

After the dot-com crash, his parents also lost “a ton” of money on companies Shahin suggested, he said. He was unaware his dad hung on to the Nvidia stock until he inherited it “very recently.”

Owning a chunk of these companies doesn’t weigh on him, he said. He has an “exit strategy” for “divesting.” When? Later, because of “tax implications,” he said. He declined to specify what he meant, though said he’d sold some of it already. (When he filed the form on August 2, he didn’t specify when he’d acquired it or if it had already been sold.) The Nvidia stock was at the “top of his list” to liquidate, but because its value had skyrocketed since the AI boom, the “tax implications” were higher.

Shahin isn’t anti-data center; he just thinks their construction should be open to public scrutiny and input. AI will continue being important — he’s a software engineer and uses LLMs every day — but there should be limits on its use as well, he said, especially for children. He also clarified that he doesn’t dislike Nvidia and isn’t going to keep his shares long-term. “I believe we’re headed for a crash in that market for sure, and Nvidia is at the center of it.”

Strong union politics and owning Amazon stock seem like an unlikely fit, but Amazon is not exclusively bad for unions, he said. In fact, the company offers a big chance to strengthen them.

“I’m a super strong advocate of unions for sure, and Amazon is one of the biggest opportunities for unions that exists out there,” he said. “They had the chance, they tried and got hit hard by Amazon. But what is that? Are we giving up on the opportunity to let workers organize themselves? I’ve advocated for stronger policies to let unions organize, make it really easy for unions to organize. That was part of my mission, so I don’t view Amazon as the enemy as much as I view it as an opportunity to organize, for organized labor to do its thing.” 

If it were up to the voters to deny or allow Amazon to build its proposed warehouse in McKinleyville, Shahin said he would vote to allow it, if an analysis showed it would be an “economic benefit overall” to the community, such as providing more jobs.

He also had a positive history with the platform. Shahin was the owner of a comic store in the Bay Area when the Great Recession hit in 2008, and Amazon “kept me alive,” he said. It allowed him to sell books that people just weren’t buying at the brick-and-mortar store. And his stockholder status also allows him to change the company from the inside.

Shahin knew it was pretty likely someone would notice his investments eventually. He remains committed to transparency, he said. “I don’t think that my overall investment strategy, of which those parts are a minor piece, has anything to do with things outside of my values,” he said. “…I don’t want to talk about my overall investment strategy. I don’t feel that’s pertinent.”

And what if someone called him a hypocrite?

“I would say that that’s a subjective call,” he said. “If you don’t know all the facts, I could see where somebody would say that, but if they actually listened to what I said and understood the complicated campaign finance laws and how they work, then I don’t think they could call me that.”

“What I would say is that I’ve complied with the rules,” he continued. “I — we have a — I don’t need to do anything more than that, basically. I’ve let people know they can decide for themselves if they think I’m a hypocrite.”

Anyone that invests in a 401k or buys a chunk of Nasdaq Composite also owns a piece of those companies, regardless of their politics, Shahin said. “All of us are implicated in these things.”