South Park turns its satire on the artificial intelligence boom tonight, with Butters Stotch leading a suburban revolt against the data centers rising in his hometown.
Comedy Central released the logline for Season 29, Episode 6 on Tuesday. It says Butters is “unhappy with the data centers that the billionaires are building in our backyards.” The episode airs at 10 p.m. ET/PT and streams on Paramount+ afterward.
A promo clip released Wednesday morning adds detail. An X-Pest exterminator rings Butters’ doorbell and asks about the billionaires in his backyard. “There’s more of these stupid billionaires every day,” Butters answers, according to Deadline. A still from the episode shows the exterminator with a poison tank strapped on and his spray wand raised.
The timing is pointed. The clip appeared the same morning President Trump used a White House press conference to praise the AI work of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
The series, rebranded South America for this season, has already needled the tech industry. An earlier episode mocked Apple and Google for quickly going along after the Trump administration renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America.” The Hollywood Reporter noted that the logline hints at Silicon Valley figures turning up in town. Peter Thiel visited in Season 28’s “Twisted Christian,” a fan favorite, and the show may not be finished with him.
AI has been a recurring target. Season 26’s “Deep Learning” showed Stan leaning on ChatGPT, and 2025’s “Sickofancy” lampooned chatbots that flatter their users.
The subject carries extra weight in Hollywood, where unions fear job losses and writers and directors worry about what generative tools mean for their craft. Actor Mark Ruffalo has warned of “really profoundly scary technology” entering the industry.
Data center builders include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who is financing Paramount’s deal for Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount owns Comedy Central, which airs South Park. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have shown before that they will mock the company that pays them.
Note: The Hollywood Reporter page returned a paywall error, so I worked from search excerpts of it and the coverage listed above. Check the quotes against the full articles before publishing.
