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The data center boom is concentrated in the U.S.
- OGEnthusiast 10mo ago[flagged]
- monero-xmr 10mo agoWe live in a free society. No one votes on companies building things and expanding their enterprises. That would be socialism
- fuzzer371 10mo agoDoesn't sound too free to me
- t-writescode 10mo agoOn the contrary, companies building things is *constantly* under scrutiny for local building plans. That’s literally what the NIMBY / YIMBY movements are all about - using political clout and power (especially including voting) to affect what can and cannot be built.
- graeme 10mo agoThat's not quite correct. There's a lot of NIMBY pressure in cities, where land is scarce and there's lots of people to attend planning meetings to block building. However, if you want to build a datacenter, you don't need to build it in downtown Manhattan. You can build it anywhere, and some places make it easy to build data centers. By definition local restrictions apply locally. If you want more housing in Manhattan then Manhattan nimbyism really matters. But if you want to build a data center somewhere you have a lot of options. There's no nationwide vote on allowing datacenter construction.
- nemomarx 10mo agoI do wonder if you'll see local community NIMBYs about it though. Electricity prices near data centers go up, right?
- jeffbee 10mo agoNo, they go down, obviously if you think about it. Having a huge volume consumer nearby amortizes away the fixed costs of the grid, which are massive. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1040619025000612-gr5_lrg.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S10406190250006...
- t-writescode 10mo agoExcept, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec... > Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.
- jeffbee 10mo agoYeah I don't have the inclination to repeat myself but it's a bad article based on bad data and flawed reasoning. Bloomberg also ran this article, by the same author, that says AI data centers are interfering with your applicances, which is also pure bullshit. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-ai-power-home-appliances/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-ai-power-home-applia...
- cowsandmilk 10mo agoWhat fixed costs of the grid? In Northern Virginia, we’re constantly adding substations and transmission lines because the grid isn’t a fixed cost when you’re building data centers constantly; it quickly becomes a variable cost.
- jonas21 10mo ago> Electricity prices near data centers go up, right? I hear this a lot, but the most comprehensive study I've seen found the opposite -- that retail electricity prices tend to decrease as load (from datacenters and other consumers) increases [1]. The places where electricity prices have increased the most since 2019 (California, Hawaii, and the Northeast) are not places where they're building a lot of new datacenters. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619025000612 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...
- wolvoleo 10mo agoSocialism is the way for people to be free. Extreme capitalism is the way for the ultra rich and their companies to be free.
- monero-xmr 10mo agoSocialism is the way for the majority to constrict the individual. You may want that but I do not
- platevoltage 10mo agoCorporations aren't people, Mitt.
- monero-xmr 10mo agoI don't want to have the will of democracy applied to every commerce decision made
- platevoltage 10mo agooooookay, is anyone suggesting that?
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo agoYeah, and who gets to vote on bailing these companies out when their finances collapse and picking up the collateral damage? OpenAI is already normalizing the eventual bailout.
- monero-xmr 10mo agoI wish, so so deeply in my bones, that after the 2008 financial crisis we just let everything fail. Fail fail fail, pain, turmoil. But after the pain would have been a much better, fairer system, where large banks and other "systemically important companies" like insurers would actually have to watch what they are doing, and prove they are careful stewards of money. As an aside, basically all hedge funds in America park their funds in the Cayman Islands. Nobody is going to bail out the Cayman Islands (other than hedge funds). So I would hope that if a series of large hedge funds fail, holding myriad funds of high net worth individuals, they just fail
- coliveira 10mo agoThe Fed was created EXACTLY to bail out large banks when they inevitably fail due to the nature of their mismanaged business. Don't expect anything different.
- monero-xmr 10mo agoYou can imagine my opinion on the fed!
- jscottmiller 10mo agoThis is false - the way these data centers are financed and built is a direct result of the financial and legal systems established and enforced by our government. I do not say this to argue for more or less construction, but to point out that it is as much a creation of our society as the NHS is of the UK.
- jeffbee 10mo agoI have a hard time seeing the truth of your statement. If I think about where Google's largest data centers are located in America, they are all on former industrial sites that had access to large amounts of power and water, like the old Gatorade factory in Oklahoma. While you can argue I guess that this choice, like everything else, was the product of all choices made by society prior, I am not seeing a direct connection between financial and legal incentives and the siting of those data centers.
- eli_gottlieb 10mo agoNonetheless, we did not vote directly for or against any particular data-center. They don't go up for a vote that way. It would take forever and nothing would get built if you gave voters a possible veto on literally every single thing.
- kmeisthax 10mo agoPublicly traded companies with shareholder voting are socialist now? Like, here's the purely greed-driven capitalist argument: "Why are you throwing my investment away on a specious gamble that we can 100x America's datacenter buildout with a capex spend that would dwarf the actual government?"
- platevoltage 10mo agoA free society, with a masked police force.
- idiotsecant 10mo agoScroll down a bit and the US is leading the world in 'planned' datacenters and lagging in data centers actually under construction.
- petcat 10mo agoSeems like a very small gap considering it's showing the US vs every other country in the world combined.
- webwielder2 10mo ago[flagged]
- cyanydeez 10mo agoTgis has more to do with finance bros than anything else. Americas regulatory system is defenseless.
- tpmoney 10mo agoAlternatively, we can build things fast as long as you don't need an act of congress to get it built or funded.
- coliveira 10mo agoCongress is literally acting by providing funding for AI projects in the country.
- arjie 10mo agoI think it's more that the US can still build fast so long as it presents some pressing need for someone: economic, military, or social. As an example, infrastructure projects take forever, but then when there is a piece of infrastructure that actually needs building, governments choose appropriate incentives. When the MacArthur Maze fell down because of a tank truck fire, the contract paid out $200k per day ahead of schedule the fix was delivered. The winning company bid way under everyone else and just produced quality to inspectors' desire way ahead of schedule to win most of it on early completion bonuses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Maze#Rebuilding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Maze#Rebuilding And not everything in America is slow to build. Once the F-35 program got going it got going. There are 1100 such jets or something in the world now. 150 F-35 every year or so. The reality is that for the things that most yuppies want built (housing and transit infrastructure) there are many domestic opponents and a regulatory regime that affords those opponents control over production. For instance, we wouldn't really have Starlink if it weren't for the fact that SpaceX is using DoD clearance to fly its rockets. The California Coastal Commission would stall all such flight attempts otherwise.
- andsoitis 10mo agoData Center buildouts also hot in Saudi Arabia: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/12/17/saudi-arabia-wants-to-host-the-worlds-cheapest-data-centres https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/12/17/...
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoThat's just another vanity project that will go bust like everything else SA does to try and buy credibility.
- coliveira 10mo agoNo, the Saudi will sell access to Chinese researchers. It is a very smart move.
- defrost 10mo agoDitto Australia, Atlassian co founder has pivoted SunCable (solar energy to Asia) project to Solar Power for Data Centres in Australia. Data centres coming for what's left of Australia's green export superpower dream (crikey.com.au) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362487 two weeks ago
- Ologn 10mo agoStock market last 365 days: S&P 500 - up 16% Nvidia - up 25% ICLN (global clean energy ETF) - up 46% Micron - up 246% Seagate - up 270% Western Digital - up 342%
- jeffbee 10mo agoAll USD denominated. The SPX is up none in Euro terms over the last 1y.
- twoodfin 10mo agoWhat odds would you take that repeats in 2026?
- websiteapi 10mo agoif you're in USA buying things in USD does this even matter?
- coliveira 10mo agoThe USD is losing purchasing power, that's the implication of all these price changes with respect to pretty much any asset.
- websiteapi 10mo agoagain, what's the relevance to an American who makes USD spending in USA?
- lotsofpulp 10mo agoBecause some of the things they buy are imported, or depend on imports. Unless an American’s income went up by the same amount, they lost purchasing power. The greater the proportion of non-USD assets they have, the greater purchasing power retained (i.e. the wealthy that depend less on selling their labor).
- 10mo ago
- biophysboy 10mo agoSome fun facts I recently learned from JP Morgan's "Eye on the Market" (which I highly recommend) - Tech capex in 2025 was about as much $ as the 1944 manhattan project, the 1949 electricity buildout, the 1964 Apollo project, the 1966 Interstate highway project COMBINED. - OpenAI promised to pay Oracle $60B, which it doesn't earn yet; in return Oracle promised to provide them cloud facilities they haven't built yet. These will require over 2 Hoover dams worth of power.
- twoodfin 10mo agoInstead of paperclip maximization, our economy is hell-bent on matmul maximization. The crazy thing is, I’m not sure it’s crazy.
- biophysboy 10mo agoIt does feel very brute force though, doesn't it? It feels like we should be able to guess the manifold that has all the important stuff for each question. But it doesn't seem like we can currently! Why not?
- glhaynes 10mo agoI’ll take the opposite side! This seems completely unprecedented. I have nearly no faith in any estimates of even the relatively near-term future.
- twoodfin 10mo agoRight! It seems to me that any range of uncertainty on aggregate demand is at orders of magnitude more than we could build even if we 10X’d the current madness. Pause all current advancement in GPU and model R&D. How much matmul would the world consume if everyone had all-you-can-eat access to January ‘26 frontier models at all-to-yourself performance levels at 0 incremental cost? Compare to, I dunno, unlimited pizza or unlimited electricity. Yes, if you’re smelting aluminum the latter would be a big deal. But a lot more people want to code SaaS faster and better, or have an omniscient personal assistant on call 24/7.
- aetherson 10mo agoI was chatting about this with a friend. It feels like there's a real opportunity for a relatively-poor-but-democratic country to say, "Look, for real, we will pass the strongest data protection laws in the world, and we will let you build as many solar panels as you want + use as much water as you want, just sink a couple hundred billion into OUR economy."
- thfuran 10mo agoWho is that meant to entice?
- aetherson 10mo agoPeople who build data centers. Strong data protection laws (in a relatively stable democratic country) so that customers will feel okay putting their workloads in a data center, and then low regulatory burden and cost to the inputs to making a data center work (mainly electricity and water for cooling). There would obviously still be things that would make a data center builder feel less-than-great about locating in a developing country, but there's also a LOT of money sloshing around in the data center buildout right now, if you could get people to just try it out with a small minority of their money it could be a very big deal for some countries.
- saguntum 10mo agoYou might enjoy the plot of Cryptonomicon
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- cmiles8 10mo agoIt’s all broadly backed by a bunch of IOUs issued by those with no clear path to come up with the cash to pay the bill when it comes due. Hence the rising prices of credit default swaps.
- adventured 10mo agoNo it's de facto backed by this: Operating income Microsoft: $136 billion, Apple: $133 billion, Alphabet: $124 billion, Nvidia: $110 billion, Meta: $82 billion, Amazon: $76 billion $658 billion in op income for just six companies, growing at 10%+ per year. Maybe $8.5-$9 trillion in op income over the next decade. They have nothing else to spend it on other than over-priced share buybacks or dividends, most are under realistic anti-trust restrictions and can't freely buy major competitors. AI is an open field and they have the capital to burn. Without all that financial firepower in the background driving everything none of it happens.
- willis936 10mo agoAlmost feels like they're not paying their fair share to the society that made them.
- m463 10mo agoIs this just the efficiency of the US financial market? Does the acceleration outperform governments in other countries? (that said, title seems to imply US thinking on datacenters is different/wrong/etc)
- thoughtstheseus 10mo agoYes. USA financial markets are the envy of the world. Lots of capital which flows quickly.
- jaynamburi 9mo agoThe concentration of new data center capacity in the U.S. makes sense when you look at the inputs: access to capital, hyperscaler demand, relatively predictable regulation, and deep energy and fiber infrastructure. Regions like Northern Virginia, Texas, and the Midwest already have the grid connectivity and permitting pathways to scale quickly. That said, this concentration also creates second-order risks. Power availability, water usage, and local grid stability are becoming real constraints, and they don’t scale linearly. We’re already seeing projects delayed not by compute demand but by interconnection queues and transmission bottlenecks. Long term, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more geographic diversification not because demand moves, but because energy and infrastructure constraints force it. Compute may be global, but power and land are very local.