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What's slowing down the AI buildout
- jqpabc123 3mo ago‘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.
- mullingitover 3mo agoYou 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.
- SilentM68 3mo ago> 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.
- rayiner 3mo agoWho 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.
- jqpabc123 3mo agohttps://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2025/07/31/trump-admin-blocking-clean-energy-and-raising-costs/ https://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2025/07/31/trump-admin-bloc... https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/06/05/views-on-trump-administration-energy-policies-and-priorities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/06/05/views-on-trum...
- defrost 3mo ago> Who is opposing renewable energy? The current US admin: Trump’s Multi-Pronged Attack on Renewable Energy https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/faculty_scholarship/article/5755/&path_info=Gerrard_Trumps_Multi_Pronged_Attack_on_Renewable_Energy.pdf https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?par... but they are slowly being beaten back: Trump admin abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges - https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/trump-admin-abandons-fight-against-wind-energy-as-clean-energy-output-surges/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/trump-admin-abandons... The Trumpian adventures in Iran have wrong footed his fossil fuel buddies and slowed his Don Quixote roll against giant scary windmills for now.
- matwood 3mo agoHe hates wind turbines because he simply doesn't like how they look, and couldn't stop them next to one of his golf courses. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
- jqpabc123 3mo agoAnd he hates solar because??? If you look at the overall picture, it's clear that he opposes anything not carbon based. And cost isn't a rational reason for it. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-approve-solar-or-wind-power-projects.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-appro...
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- recursive 3mo agoIf there was an oil refinery that looked exactly the same as a turbine from the outside, I would bet that he would love how those would look. The root cause is something else. Hmmm...
- arjie 3mo agoThat'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-solar-plant/ 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-plant-closure-carbon-emissions-new-york 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.
- ullunaam 3mo agoCrusoe bypasses the grid completely by leveraging old batteries and wasted resources to power compute.
- onion2k 3mo agoThe 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!"
- pitched 3mo agoIn 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.
- ahartmetz 3mo agoI'm not sure if the classic adoption curve applies. Has there ever been a product that vendors were shoving down customer's throats as relentlessly as AI?
- officialchicken 3mo ago"Internet" enabled devices, or "railroads" - for example.
- vitally3643 3mo agoAds
- Schiendelman 3mo agoI doubt it. We're less than six months in to really good coding agents, and they keep improving. Software will eat a lot more of the business world when it's this much cheaper and faster to produce.
- rayiner 3mo agoWe should have been building more nuclear. We’re not going to upgrade civilization with windmills and putting on sweaters. Think of how much power we’ll need for millions of robots?
- OKRainbowKid 3mo agoI don't see how expensive energy helps us "upgrade civilization".
- lionkor 3mo agoUnlimited energy for 200 years is a good step, no?
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo agoIt's hardly unlimited. And not if plants can't get cooling water because of drought. https://www.euronews.com/2026/06/25/france-takes-nuclear-reactors-offline-amid-record-heatwave https://www.euronews.com/2026/06/25/france-takes-nuclear-rea...
- OKRainbowKid 3mo agoThe sun provides unlimited energy for billions of years, significantly cheaper and without the hypothetical risk of turning huge areas uninhabitable or causing incidents with damage in the trillions.
- lionkor 3mo agoUntil you have bad weather, yeah. If you have literally any sources at all that modern(!!!) nuclear reactors are unsafe (so, those that would be built today), or less safe, than any other kind of power production, Id love to see it.
- OKRainbowKid 3mo ago
- neuroelectron 3mo agoMaybe 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.
- pitched 3mo agoTFA 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.
- convolvatron 3mo agojust 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.
- cobbzilla 3mo agoCheap ubiquitous distributed power systems will change the world in many weird ways. Watch small modular nuclear offer home installation for ~$reasonable and getting cheaper every year. Fast forward 20 years from the advent of essentially infinite energy results in WWIII and a new “Great Detente” but only after all the assholes have wreaked all the havoc they can. There are dark days ahead but ultimately a brighter future. Sucks to live through that transition phase though.
- walrus01 3mo agoI'd like to see a well reasoned plan to install small modular nuclear power at peoples houses that prevents the mentally ill, criminally reckless or terrorist minded people from cracking them open and obtaining access to the isotopes.
- pitched 3mo agoThere isn’t much need to extract isotopes if you have an actual working reactor, is there? Just use that as-is to cause whatever damage.
- walrus01 3mo agoFrom a strictly red team threat analysis perspective, if you have an extremely safe working reactor that can't be made to melt down, no, the reactor can't be used to hurt much that is in the same location as the reactor. If you are able to get the isotopes out and start spreading them around or making a dirty bomb type thing (where the explosion just serves the purpose of throwing the isotopes around), that could be pretty catastrophic.
- cobbzilla 3mo agohave you never visited a rural neighborhood? or an affluent neighborhood? there are still many neighborhoods where people leave their doors unlocked because it is actually that safe. not every location is rife with criminal activity, and many are well protected.
- 9cb14c1ec0 3mo agoQuestion 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?
- pitched 3mo agoI think it’s more likely we’ll raise prices until demand lowers enough to match supply.
- linkregister 3mo agoOpen models enforce a floor on prices, unless overall compute is so constrained that those prices rise also.
- 0xbadcafebee 3mo agoThis 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.
- bjustin 3mo agoDeploying thousands more gas turbines in a short time is impossible. Lead times for gas turbines are already multiple years.
- bob1029 3mo agoProject Kilby is probably the most intelligent approach to this problem so far. https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2026/q2/chevron-signs-20-year-power-agreement-with-microsoft-for-west-texas-data-center 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.
- fragmede 3mo agoThe ocean tidal power data center idea was a neat one.
- cactusplant7374 3mo agoI agree. It has to be more viable than sending GPUs to space.
- wongarsu 3mo agoBoth are questionable. Tidal power is super neat in theory but we really struggle to make it viable in practice. GPUs in space are probably the lower risk option, but with even more questionable economics My preferred outlandish idea would be to put the data centers next to solar farms in the Sahara. I just don't know yet how we are going to make the batteries to power that through the night
- h4kunamata 3mo ago1. 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.
- TwoNineFive 3mo ago> AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart Premise perverted, FUD averted, false-victimhood denied. A datacenter did not murder your family.
- jurgenburgen 3mo agoA data center might not have murdered his family but the constant AI hype is super tiresome. PR heads are raging over the amazing shit that AI does and how everything is going to change and just WOWZA BAZINGA. Yet in my daily life I use it for years and it’s wrong _all_ the time, I end up having to yell at it because it keeps being lazy and gaslighting me, the data centers boil the oceans and rich assholes beg my government to throw billions of good money after bad to build more of this shit. What the fuck? I want to live in the future and all they gave me was some shitty Fisher’s price AI.
- dfjosfasdfoj 3mo ago[dead]
- baerbelblue 3mo ago[flagged]
- bluetrain 3mo agoThis almost reads as satire from something like The Onion. What on earth does "Hollywood and their woke agenda" have to do with how AI data centers are powered?
- beepbooptheory 3mo agoI 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.
- loosetypes 3mo agoOr: filming location for the next Bond movie
- felix-the-cat 3mo ago“Do you expect me to code?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to prompt!”
- rconti 3mo agoRemember when we didn't have enough electricity for electric cars?
- buckle8017 3mo agoHave 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.
- odie5533 3mo agoIs that from the popularity of evs, or from data centers?
- warumdarum 3mo agoThe thoughtfull hyped reality downvoter must know before doing the deed ..
- asdff 3mo agoAt least in California it is felt really among people who have private power providers that need to both turn a profit and appease shareholders while also paying out various lawsuits and penalties from causing wildfires with poorly maintained equipment. Compare those rates to what you'd get under a municipal power company like LADWP and the difference is dramatic.
- kulahan 3mo agoIt doesn’t really matter if, at the end of the day, our current usage is too high and consumers see EVs as a pro-social purchase. I don’t really think they’re a problem, personally, but it IS the topic of this comment thread, so it’s an appropriate place to complain about this particular issue. Edit: also, the problem with charging vehicles isn’t really home owner cars, it’s tractor-trailers.
- michaelmrose 3mo agoIt's more like 2% of cars on the road you are thinking about portion of new cars sold.
- cdrnsf 3mo agoApparently 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-epa-lee-zeldin-fast-track-private-gas-fired-power-plants-ai-data-centers/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/donald-trump-ep...
- ericd 3mo agoSupposedly the backlog for gas turbines is over 5 years at this point, so they can approve all they want.
- jappgar 3mo agoYes they will approve as many as possible to drive the price of turbines even higher.
- Schiendelman 3mo agoThese 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-energy-accounts-for-88-of-new-u-s-electrical-capacity-in-2025/ https://environmentamerica.org/center/updates/renewable-ener...
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- mawadev 3mo ago"The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity." We put the cart before the horse, lets stop talking about growth and focus on making it useful first lmao
- trescenzi 3mo agoTotally agree. One thing the AI bros believe though is that growth == useful. If you strongly believe that the larger the model the smarter it is then you think through growth we get AGI which implicitly is useful because reasons.
- hraxz 3mo agoOr maybe you just lack the intellectual curiosity to get anything from these models. You have to a fucking moron to think Claude is not "useful".
- trescenzi 3mo agoMy stance is more that compute isn’t the limiting factor anymore. These models are useful if you’re a software dev. What we need is time to integrate these models in ways that are useful to normal people. I do not share the belief that if we keep expanding we’ll hit some magical limit where it’ll suddenly be a god and solve our problems.
- dfjosfasdfoj 3mo ago[dead]
- ryss20 3mo ago[flagged]
- ecshafer 3mo agoThe politicization of AI has been a huge damper. NYS put a 1 year moratorium on datacenters with some municipalities doing so as well. My town did a 1 year ban, despite us being a retarded location for a data center (more expensive land than surrounding areas, less water access, far from power). US has also been lagging in power capacity, because of the anti-growth segment of politics. More nukes.
- Terr_ 3mo ago> The politicization of AI This should include the AI companies trying to sell their product to the government, suggesting it is a strategic asset in need of protectionism, and playing the PR game of "our product will let us own the world, we're so awesome you should be scared and invest."
- Shitty-kitty 3mo agoEven rural localities in blood-red states are opposing datacenters. Noise, water electricity usage coupled with few permanent jobs and little tax-income due to subsidies have made them unpalatable to many.
- ecshafer 3mo agoTax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built. Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence. Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.
- Shitty-kitty 3mo agoThe problem is that they are building these wherever they can without any consideration for how they are affecting the communities. The noise concerns are common because they build them in areas without enough electric capacity. The water concerns are real, not because of some paper or because the water usage is incredibly high but again because they built them in locations that don't have enough of that resource. The tax subsidies were negotiated in bad-faith, essentially lying about the number of permanent high-paying jobs they bring.
- jimbokun 3mo agohttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dIvV!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F68e0c524-4d4a-4a71-8f3e-70b0fad16ed1_1024x891.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dIvV!,w_1456,c_limit... Of the items on this chart, I would say AI data centers are providing the least amount of value per % of GDP spent. And 1930s public works the highest.
- kulahan 3mo agoI wonder how public works funding would look if 90% of the nation wasn’t painfully far behind in maintenance. But also, AI data centers have been around for like 3 years. It’s not surprising they haven’t reached a high level of efficiency yet. IMO they are not an argument against excessive power use (I know this is not your argument, just a common one), but rather and argument FOR better (read: nuclear) power generation.
- fnordian_slip 3mo agoWhy do so many otherwise seemingly rational people pretend that nuclear is the answer to our energy needs? It doesn't make sense economically, it's just wishful thinking. The only cheap nuclear energy is from plants that have already been built, because it won't help if we tear them down. But as soon as you factor in the costs of building, insurance and storage of materials, it's always more expensive than renewables. And while the cost of renewables is still trending downwards, the cost of new reactors is rising, even in China.
- sensanaty 3mo agoI don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear. The actual position is that we need a mix of both nuclear and renewables while ramping down non-renewable sources as fast as possible, because you need both intermittent cheap generation and reliable baseload that doesn't care if the wind stops blowing or clouds roll over the panels. The pricing story remains unconvincing to me. LCOE comparisons measure the cost of producing a unit of electricity, but they don't account for what it costs to actually integrate that electricity into a working grid. Solar and wind are cheap on paper, but they still need storage or backup generation to cover the hours they're not producing, and that cost gets left out of the simple dollar per MWh number. Once you factor in grid balancing and storage, the gap closes a lot, and in some studies it disappears entirely depending on the region's wind and solar resources. Obviously things have to be considered in the context of where we're putting these power plants, Norwegians can probably afford to rely a lot more on offshore wind and hydro than a place like Serbia could. Nuclear plants will obviously be expensive to build, and will likely always be more expensive than renewables to initially build just due to the sheer complexity involved when compared to renewable sources, but I can't think of a better use of that money personally, especially compared to how much gets spent on far worse things like chucking a billion dollars worth of missiles at Iran[0] for quite literally no reason and especially benefit to anyone (other than arms industry I guess) whatsoever. Also, already built and paid off nuclear plants are consistently some of the cheapest electricity around, often profitable without any subsidy at all. 70%(!!!!) of France's electricity comes from nuclear. They exported more electricity last year than countries like Belgium consumes in an entire year. They enjoy some of the cheapest power prices in the region because of their historical nuclear fleet, and had people had the same attitude back in the day (looking at you, German "green" party), that fleet would've never gotten built. Letting your offspring enjoy the shade of the tree you plant today and all that stuff, it'll always be too expensive until we actually hunker down and just build the bloody things. And yeah, new builds like Flamanville have been a mess on cost and timeline, that's a fair criticism of new construction, but it doesn't erase what a mature nuclear fleet does for a grid once it's actually built, and can generally be applied to pretty much any infrastructure project anywhere in the world. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845514 - US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers
- freejazz 3mo agoNot enough!
- emsign 3mo agoPeak demand
- hackable_sand 3mo agoAlways double down on bad decisions.
- overgard 3mo ago> But if AI is a race with national security implications, they won’t be fast enough. I really don't think this is the case. As far as I can tell there are two national security things where LLMs have some utility; mass surveilance (ick!!!) or software security. To me that does not justify a huge infrastructure buildout considering the implications of said infrastructure.
- ath3nd 3mo ago[dead]
- trhway 3mo agokind of reminded USSR history of 100 years ago - a mostly agrarian country destroyed by war and revolution doing jump into industrialization with electrification being the driving core of it (the other major factor was GULAG - electrification plus unlimited free labor - winning formula :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO "In 1920, British writer H. G. Wells visited Soviet Russia and met with Vladimir Lenin. Wells believed that it was impossible to realise the Russian revolutionary’s plan, as he wrote in his book Russia in the Shadows: For Lenin, who like a good orthodox Marxist denounces all "Utopians," has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians. He is throwing all his weight into a scheme for the development of great power stations in Russia to serve whole provinces with light, with transport, and industrial power..." Our civilization is converging on electricity right now. 200 year ago electricity looked like a set of disparate phenomena. I wonder if in 200 years we'll be basing our society on some new energy form instead of electricity - something like gravitational conductors or some StarTrek singularity generators and plasma coils.
- ath3nd 3mo ago[dead]
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo agoI don't get why its hard to find electricity for data centers. Just build them where its cheap, like the deserts in China and stuff. Duh.
- IshKebab 3mo agoYeah like, doesn't Texas have plenty of land available for solar? Why isn't the Nevada desert filled with solar panels?