alt Hacker News~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
Replies
Gas turbines can be spun up really quickly through either portable systems (like xAI did for their cluster) [1] or actual builds [2] in an emergency. The biggest limitation is permits.
With a state like Texas and a Federal Government thats onboard these permits would be a much smaller issue. The press conference makes this seem more like, "drill baby drill" (drilling natural gas) and directly talking about them spinning up their own power plants.
[1] https://www.kunr.org/npr-news/2024-09-11/how-memphis-became-...
[2] https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/resources/case-studies/t...
> It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country
I’ve been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy Press Programme for some years [1].
This isn’t quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10 years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power generation and data transmission infrastructure.)
It is not the just queue that is the bottleneck. If the new power plants designed specifically for powering these new AI data centers are connected to the existing electric grid, the energy prices for regular customers will also get affected - most likely in an upwardly fashion. That means, the cost of the transmission upgrades required by these new datacenters will be socialized which is a big problem. There does not seem to be a solution in sight for this challenge.
Maybe they will invest in nuclear reactors.
Data center, AI and nuclear power stations. Three advanced technologies, that's pretty good.
Notably it is significantly more than the revenue of either of AWS or Azure. It is very comparable to the sum of both, but consolidated into the continental US instead distributed globally.
watching the press conference and Onsite power production were mentioned. I assume this means SMRs and solar.
One possibility would be just to build their own power plants colocated with the datacenters and not interconnect at all.
Dcs will start generating power on site soon. I know micro nuclear is one area actively being explored.
That‘s why the tech oligarchs told Trump that Canada is required. Cheap hydroelectric power…
Don't worry, they said they are doing it in Texas where the power grid is super reliable and able to handle the massive additional load.
How else do you think Trump is going to bring back all the coal jobs? SV is going to help burn down the planet and is giddy over the prospect.
They say this will include hundreds of thousands of jobs. I have little doubt that dedicated power generation and storage is included in their plans.
Also I have no doubt that the timing is deliberate and that this is not happening without government endorsement. If I had to guess the US military also is involved in this and sees this initiative as important for national security.