Anyone know? Feel like I should get educated on this so I don’t look silly when I talk about it. I guess we can support it much more easily than I thought.
So I do actually work for a utility that has a LOT of data centers being put in near it.
The plan, as it stands, is massive capital expenditure outlay (read: spending a ton of money).
We’re planning on adding 2-3 combined cycle natural gas plants, I don’t even know how many solar farms, and 3-4 battery storage facilities, along with significantly expanding our transmission grid (though we are trying to put a lot of the generating facilities near data centers to cut down on the need for transmission lines); basically almost doubling our generating capacity over the next 5 years.
Revenue to support this is supposedly only going to come from the companies themselves, and from what I can tell, the contracts were written in such a way that the companies are responsible for making minimum charge payments for 10-20 years even if they should default (but the companies themselves are Google and other similarly sized firms, so I’m not sure how well enforceable those will be should these firms really decide to cut bait…)
It makes me deeply uneasy; not to mention, most of the supplied power isn’t coming from completely green or renewable sources, and we are keeping our coal plants operational instead of phasing them out, which was supposedly the original plan before AI became so ubiquitous. And that is to say nothing of trying to get all of this shit, substations, transmission lines, and plants, in the ground in like a 5 year window, in an area that has been extremely low growth for longer than I’ve been alive.
I don’t even know how to begin to parse this lol I’ve never been an Econ guy, but everything that’s been happening lately seems to be a flagrant violation of le basic Econ libertarians love so much. I guess I will never understand how companies can continue to take these massive losses to build something with an expected payout that never comes.
Holy shit it’s all incredibly nonsensical
My understanding is the utility is not taking losses (yet), but rather are taking out loans for the build-out of the more significant parts of the infrastructure, with the idea being they will be re-paid with the incoming revenue from the data-centers themselves
How well that works is going to be almost entirely dependent upon whether or not AI stays common enough for those data-centers to remain open, sooo…
I’ve been polishing my resume
Revolution with a change in focus to renewable infrastructure.
Any less is going to result in the absolute crash and rolling black outs. Though I honestly don’t see how it won’t happen at this point. The clock is ticking down on fossil fuels a lot faster then previously thought.
ELI5: It won’t. And we’ll experience brownouts or they will disconnect the datacenters at inopportune times.
It seems they are building data centers with gas plants within the facilities, so datacenters are now a major contributor to climate change.
I feel like I’m losing my mind out here because if you don’t name the exact reasons why this shit is problematic, you won’t be taken seriously. It seems highly coordinated
You can’t be reasonable while the party (the bubble) is still ongoing.
On-premises natural gas turbines.
Yes, that is an ecological disaster and will exacerbate climate change.
No, the people implementing this do not care.
This is the answer. The USA’s capacity to build utility-scale plants has atrophied significantly since the 90s, and would require a decade of ramp-up to meet the projected demand. We literally don’t have enough engineers and other specialists to do it, so you’re talking about putting people through school and training before there would even be enough hands to physically do the labor. On top of that, it would require industrial policy to make the financing work (e.g., government-backed loans, because of course it would all be done through private companies).
In the meantime, you can do stuff like import gas turbines from South Korea.
Uh… You literally just said we can’t do the thing and then said we’ll do the thing. Gas turbines from South Korea are the components you need to build a power plant. Sure, you can build it behind the meter, but it still requires engineers and other specialists and as you said, we don’t have enough of those to go around. So, no, the idea of making independent power plants to run these data centers is just as hard as making grid-attached power plants
There’s a difference between building more grid capacity and building a private generator.
One requires more engineering expertise than the other.
But it’s the same type of engineering expertise, of which we have a shortage. For example, Amazon said they’re going to build a 7.5GW gas power plant for their data center cluster. The largest gas power plant in the world is 8.5GW and it took 40 years to build. It sort of doesn’t matter if Amazon’s plant is going to be grid-attached or not, it’s going to be a massive engineer effort.
Oh so we’re cooked then. Nice to know I can stop worrying about putting money into my 401k
No joke. I have a pension that I’m sure I’ll never get to draw from. How many once in a lifetime financial crises must the millennial generation endure? I’d gladly give up my retirement/financial future to see the whole thing blow up, though. I just hope the kids are alright.
Instead of threatening China, works with them to import solar and battery technology while reverse engineering it and reestablishing green supply chains to manufacture their own in a 5 centralized plan. A massive roll out of green technology that brings solar water heaters, solar panels, wind turbines, and sodium batteries to decentralize the grid to a massive layer.
Oh wait, I forgot you’re asking about the shithole country, it will fail and people will go without electricity. The capitalist class will be isolated with personal generators and armed guards and the working class will starve.
Here’s an excerpt from Ed Zitor’s latest post [paywall] that illustrates the challenge:
The British city of Bristol is approximately 42 square miles large, or around 1.17 billion square feet, with a population of 495,300 people. Though this is an old estimate, this article has it drawing around 6782GWh (gigawatt hours) in 2013 — so, divided by the hours in a year (8760), Bristol has around 774MW of power draw.
Stargate Abilene, OpenAI and Oracle’s perennially-delayed 1.2GW capacity data center, will (if completed) span 998,000 square feet, and have around 824MW of critical IT load, with the vast majority of it going to racks of GB200 GPUs and CPUs and the cooling necessary to stop them melting, all compressed into a space that’s approximately 1,172 times smaller than the city of Bristol, all while taking up around 50MW more power.
Oracle wants to build five more of these.
And, just to be clear, the first gigawatt data center was built in late 2025 — Musk’s Colossus 2, a Frankenstein’s monster of different GPUs powered by an illegal power plant and horrible gas turbines that are poisoning black neighborhoods.
In other words, every new “gigawatt” data center project is the project leader’s first rodeo.
Good news is they arent going to be building very many of these, the industry has financed itself in a way that means AI demand needs to grow 2-3 times in the next couple of years, at a time when it is leveling off/dropping (because it has very little ROI).
I’m not particularly educated on the topic, but I’m pretty sure any kind of sustainable growth requires a degree of planning that the US does not have.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking as well. I heard my boss say something the other day about how something won’t be a problem anymore when we have an “ai agent always running for this” and my mind immediately goes to the consequences of every company in the US operating like this.
No matter what happens, you can ensure increased energy demands we’ll be responsible for
That’s the neat part. It can’t!
US and all others neoliberals countries need entering good vibes waves. Bad vibes consume a lot of energy.
By cutting power to undesirable neighborhoods.
