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- Hacker News
- Maybe it's the same thing I heard it was six months ago when it was determined that more hardware was sold than twice the nation's supply of electric.
- This is part of why the AI bubble will burst. The only way to make the profit numbers backing the loans to AI companies is to get increased capacity, and the capacity requires energy, and the energy won't arrive in time, only partly due to all the factors here, and partly because building transmission and generation is speculative and can fail for a number of reasons.
US administration can try to pull a China and basically remove all regulatory barriers (following existing playbook of "do whatever we want and wait a year or two for the courts to catch up and stop us"). It'll create havoc that will make people very upset (more so than the people that already protest DCs in their backyards). But even then, it's construction on varied terrain and property over long distances; you can't predict exactly how that will go. Triple the estimated timeline and that is probably doable, but current AI investment likely can't wait that long, unless somebody can pull additional hundreds of billions out of a hat to extend lines of credit or a ponzi-scheme-esque paying-creditors-with-newly-lent-money. In that time the market will realize the hype was hype, the gains were modest, they'll start divesting, and then the house comes down.
One way around that might be to deploy thousands more gas turbines and make rural air quality look like 2010 Beijing. It will probably happen if things get really tight, and we'll see how the current administrations's base responds; if they stick it out, the market gets a reprieve.
by 0xbadcafebee - Deploying thousands more gas turbines in a short time is impossible. Lead times for gas turbines are already multiple years.by bjustin
- TFA isn’t about consumer usage, it is about training the next generation models. An interesting thought I heard recently is that a SOTA model has about the same parameters as the number of synapses in a Golden Retriever’s brain that are not dedicated to biological processes like breathing. Most of that should be wrapped in double quotes, don’t take it literally! But that number is about 100x lower than the same synapses in a human brain.
If the next order of magnitude costs 40B, I wonder if it’s even possible to get to the one after.
by pitched - just wait. the current gold rush has left any consideration of efficiency or price-performance at the side of the road. the entire enterprise is structured as a 'whoever can spend the most money wins the game for all time'. if we can get past that and invest more in theory and systems at a natural pace it'll just keep getting more affordable over time.by convolvatron
- ‘the abundance of [AI] will be limited by the abundance of energy’.
And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
by jqpabc123 - > And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
What isn't "purely political?"
Everything is political in the world, unfortunately.
by SilentM68 - Who is opposing renewable energy? Texas is projected to top California as the state with the largest amount of solar before the end of the Trump administration.by rayiner
- That's true, but it's bipartisan policy. The Trump admin obviously is fighting wind, though solar is just too useful to be able to be stopped even by them. But it's also popular among environmentalists to fight solar projects https://v2.courthousenews.com/greens-fight-mojave-desert-sol...
And Indian Point in NY is the classic example of how nuclear was supposed to be replaced by renewables but was replaced by gas (and many solar installations in NY were blocked so we're not coincidentally here): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/20/nuclear-...
So, it's political in that our policy is in line with what most people want: fewer renewable generation stations. But there's no outside enemy to conquer here. We've just collectively decided on this equilibrium.
by arjie - You don’t even need to mention the long-term sustainability benefits of renewable energy. It is simply the dominant option economically. Dollars in, watts produced, fossil energy can’t touch it.
Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.
- 1. People fighting back due to never ending effects caused by these massive data centers
2. Companies realising that they are burning half million to get nowhere
3. Circular investment scaring investors
4. And more recently, companies hiring people back coz the AI aimed to replace humans, created more problems than solved them
5. Memory cartel falling apart, again, they did the same thing during 2000s
6. China is making good ML free, supply and demand, destroying the US tech token business model
7. Even META has too much computer power and no enough use for them.
Those are the main reasons why AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart faster than expected.
by h4kunamata - > AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart
Premise perverted, FUD averted, false-victimhood denied.
A datacenter did not murder your family.
by TwoNineFive - The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
by onion2k - The most important sentences of the article are:
"Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed."
This is the reason why data centers are not run only on cheap solar power.
by leonidasrup - I cannot currently access Fable class models, I am out of usage credits.
Anthropic is removing these larger models from personal plans at the end of the week to focus on selling it to enterprise users.
Putting these more intelligent new models into the hands of more people seems very worthwhile to me.
by user43928 - In the Innovation Adoption Curve, we are absolutely beyond the Early Adopters phase and possibly the Early Majority. The growth rates necessarily have to start trending down because there’s no one left to sell to.by pitched
- Apparently they're fast tracking gas fired power plant approvals, so we can expect production to increase and the climate crisis to worsen. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/donald-trump-ep...by cdrnsf
- These gas fired plants are just not that meaningful, it's too little to be a big deal - we're limited by gas supply and pricing. Renewables are already most new generation: https://environmentamerica.org/center/updates/renewable-ener...by Schiendelman
- Supposedly the backlog for gas turbines is over 5 years at this point, so they can approve all they want.by ericd
- I think at the very least, once the dust settles, a lot of these datacenters could become really really cool haunted houses, giant escape rooms, etc.
The real "AI" success story will be the person that makes an IRL backrooms theme park in the husk of a datacenter.
Or: laser tag park, the vests you wear are in part old tpu/gpu components.
- Or: filming location for the next Bond movieby loosetypes
- Question for the experts: does the power crunch mean that AI hyperscalers will turn off previous generation GPU datacenters to free up power for their new Vera Rubin GPUs?by 9cb14c1ec0
- I think it’s more likely we’ll raise prices until demand lowers enough to match supply.by pitched
- Project Kilby is probably the most intelligent approach to this problem so far.
https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2026/q2/chevron-signs-20-ye...
The idea is to bring the data centers, power generators and energy supply together in the ~same physical space so the only thing you have to transmit is data. Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information.
by bob1029 - The ocean tidal power data center idea was a neat one.by fragmede
- > Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information
But this project is still moving energy- it's just moving natural gas instead of electricity!
by Bratmon - Are you really saying that in 2026, a year when only the nuts are still trying to claim climate change isn’t a thing, the most intelligent approach to the problem of powering data centres that are mostly being built for the purpose of juicing share prices is gas turbines at an industrial scale? The most intelligent approach is to not build the things. The next most intelligent approach is solar and batteries nearby. Way down the bottom of the list is burning gas to power them.by jon-wood
- Remember when we didn't have enough electricity for electric cars?by rconti
- Have you seen the price of electricity?
That's with only about 5% of cars being electric.
We've consumed nearly all of the slack in transmission capacity.
I'm expecting transmission costs to balloon.
by buckle8017 - I think Elon Musk would have happily built gas turbines on high-rises if we let him build them in the middle of the city to power those electric cars. I don't think that's a good idea, though.by arjie