We are still not building enough data centers.
That sounds almost absurd, given the scale of the current AI infrastructure boom. OpenAI and SoftBank’s Stargate campus in Texas alone is expected to cost well over $40 billion and draw around 1.2 gigawatts at peak load. Such an interesting article by @ChrisGillett
tl;dr:
AI labs need more compute. Compute needs more data centers. Data centers need enormous amounts of electricity. And the real bottleneck may not be chips, GPUs, or even energy generation itself.
It may be the grid!
Before a new data center or power plant can connect, grid operators have to study whether it will overload transmission infrastructure. In the US, the median wait for power plant interconnection reportedly increased from less than 20 months in 2005 to 55 months by 2023.
That is a brutal constraint for an industry trying to scale in months, not decades.
The current system often works on a first-come, first-served basis, which means serious projects can get stuck behind speculative or lower-value ones. The result is a growing mismatch between the speed of AI infrastructure demand and the speed of Western grid bureaucracy.
America may not have an energy shortage. It has a grid connection problem.
And if AI becomes one of the defining infrastructure races of the century, the winners may not just be the countries with the best models or the most chips, but the ones that can actually plug them in.
Highly recommend you read his whole article
