I think you should look that up. I was even being conservative: Korea and China seems to be managing consistently around the 6 year time scale, while Japan has done it in less than four years from construction start till operation.

Granted, the US would have to import professionals to do it at that speed, and politicians will of course try to hinder the process with endless bureaucracy as their sponsors would rather sell fossil fuels...

> If the company putting up the money goes bankrupt, what happens to the project?

If people didn't start such medium-length projects out of fear of hypothetical future bankruptcy, there would never have been any infrastructure projects. Investors do not worry about them going bankrupt, they worry about losing momentum and would generally rather light money on fire than stagnate. We live in a time where business people start space programs out of bloody boredom.

However, what happens in these cases is just that other investors flock the carcass and takes over for cheap, allowing them to reap the benefits without having to have footed the whole bill themselves. Bankruptcy is not closure for a company, but a restructuring often under new ownership.

The only realistic scenario where such project would be dropped is if the world situation changed enough such that it would no longer be considered profitable to complete, such as due to other technology massively leapfrogging it to the point where investing in that from scratch is better than continuing investment, or demand being entirely gone such that the finished plant would be unproductive. Otherwise the project would at most change hands until it was operational.

(Particular AI companies making it to 2030 is not really that important when it is electricity producers making these investments and running these projects to earn money from AI companies, EV charging, heatpumps, etc.)