AI Data Centers

“First of all, when you get to that level of power per rack, AC power doesn't work anymore. So like, that's a pretty wild thing. So now, now you're into DC power, which by the way, also requires its own cooling.”

“It is the most effective non-precious material for transmitting electrons, and so every time we think about grid stabilization, electrification, or things like AI data centers, the copper backbone underpins all of it.”

“The structural logic at the end of the day is going to hold regardless of who's in office, because you can't electrify anything. You can't build AI data centers without copper, and much of the world's current refining and processing capacity sits outside the U…”

“To approximate our brains, you need to have a data center that consumes the power of a million American homes running For probably six to nine months, and then you get our brains, and then every time you want to answer a question, you need the power of like a …”

“Rep Ro Khanna said he will introduce a data center bill of rights that will give local communities the right to say no to AI data centers.”

“And these tokens are among the most rapidly depreciating assets we've ever seen in a modern economy, that they've continually been falling 70 to 80% year over year on a constant performance basis for at least the last four years.”

“Everything will trade down, you know, together because that's just the leverage that you're pumping into the system. You're effectively backstopping people's ability to build ahead of their revenue. So it becomes much more violent if you ever see demand slippa…”

“I think that the cooler chips are going to prevail.”

“On the infra side, we've been doing a lot with power and fiber production. The things that are ultimately powering these AI focused data centers.”

“If there's a price performance curve on AI that minimizes the power requirements, there's going to be a lot of data centers that are going to be turned into pickleball courts.”

“I think it is the densest form of energy we can all produce and consume and it's also clean. So I think definitely would be a good source of massive scalable energy for our data centers.”

“But on on projects that are actually getting built, I do think, you know, 50% not really getting done on time is is, you know, what I would expect.”

“I think the way big data centers, big data center campuses are going to look like a few years from now, again, like, obviously the scenario is we keep adding tens of gigawatts per year that keeps growing, so, you know, we're in this AI scenario. I'm, you know,…”

“You know, the default configurations for a lot of these EDA tools assume that you're going to be running your chips in freezing temperatures. Now, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an AI data center with ice in it. So, you know, we can feel pretty co…”

“If I take all the verbal promises, and if you say there's a 125 gigawatts of AI data centers that are going to come online in the next two to three years, that's the eight to 12 trillion of CapEx in total. Not in one year, in total. That is where I come to. I …”

“I think the biggest problem is actually in power.”

“I actually believe that there'll be a lot of resistance to building data centers. It's because people incorrectly think that data centers consume a lot of water or eat up a lot of power, which isn't, both are untrue.”

“It costs sixty billion dollars to put a gigawatt on the ground today. Yeah. And we'll call it 35 of that is, are the GPUs and the silicon that's doing the training and the inference, and twenty-five billion is the land, the shell, the power, and the cooling.”

“When the monetization per gigawatt is actually increasing from, you know, call it, like, 20, twenty billion in the best, best of cases for, at the beginning of the year, To now, like, 30 to even pushing 40.”

“Data centers for a one gigawatt AI factory now, you need 50,000 tons of copper per gigawatt, and we're gonna start building 15 gigawatts of these things per year.”

“A one gigawatt data center needs five gigawatts of solar. Each gigawatt of solar takes up 7000 acres. So at five gigawatts, that's 35,000 acres. That's bigger than San Francisco.”

“The payback on these AI data centers is normally two to three years. Now, Elon has massively outperformed that with his storage deal with Anthropic where he's getting all his money back if the deal lasts a year and a bit. But normally the payback is not, it's …”

“Recent Gallup poll said seven out of 10 Americans don't want them.”

“And then AI, I think AI probably helped them with this, that they have a turbine they can use to run data centers, power for data centers. So they're not a supersonic company. They're just a jet engine company because they couldn't get anyone to sell them jet …”

“We think that they're going to surprise everyone in their deployment speed and scale up, and, you know, just looking at the landscape of energy demand in the U.S. We haven't grown the grid for decades and yet now we have this huge surge of demand for data cent…”

“So I'm a big advocate that we'll never be able to power this without a small modular nuclear or other kind of a decentralized and power generation.”

“China loves it. China loves it. Yeah, let's hand, hand AI that race over to the Chinese.”

“Visibility through kind of, 2030 is pretty clear. The investments are being made. The actors that are making these investments are the largest, most profitable companies that have ever existed on this planet. They're also, many of them are growing at very heal…”

“With this rate payer protection pledge, what you're going to see is that it could actually bring down consumer prices, because what happens is that when these data centers then set up their own power and connect to the grid, they can give back the excess to th…”

“If we don't put them here, someone else will put them on their shores, someone else will put them in their country, someone else will put them in their jurisdiction, and a lot of the economic value that arises from the people that will build those facilities, …”

“The water thing is a total hoax. Like the water is recirculated. That's a hoax.”

“I wouldn't be shocked if in the next 24 months there are essentially government government backstops for some of this spend.”

“I think energy ultimately in the next call it five years will probably be the bottleneck, and that's why we're so excited about nuclear and making investments in that area.”

“If you just look at today, you have this very aggressive ramp of growth of AI, and you don't have the same ramp on energy. You know, there's a gap between the available energy and AI. So I think energy is going to be a scarce resource also to operate an infere…”

“I think ultimately this will bring down rates for residential consumers for two reasons. One is that when the data centers create their own power. They can sell back or donate back to the grid when they connect. They don't have to connect to the grid, but once…”

“Aero derivatives are traditionally used for very specific applications, and they're not being used necessarily to power things all the time, constantly for a decade straight. They can, but that's just not typically within the design spec.”

“And right now I don't think that power itself, meaning grid connections and the generation capacity is the limiting factor. Right now it's the construction and trades. So it's human labor and supply chain that are the limiting factor is that you went from a ma…”

“Boom supersonic, instead of making supersonic jets right now, is on this good quest to create enough power for a bunch of these AI data centers that are being built right now. They use jet engines and even those like are so bad, you know, the supply chain for …”

“What they do in large part, because those spikes are actually problematic, not just to the grid, but to the equipment inside the data center as well. So what they do at least sometimes to manage that is they create dummy workloads. So they keep the power profi…”

“If we are here two years from now and there's hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, And the demand for AI stabilizes, or we built enough data centers to support the demand we have at that point in time, and the price for leasing pieces of AI for renting acc…”

“If you look in West Texas and you were to sign a solar and wind kind of affirmed green power purchase agreement in, in Texas and Urquhart territory three years ago, you might've paid 35 dollars a megawatt hour for that product. Today you're paying 65, maybe mo…”

“One is the proximity that that region has to four billion people. Because if you think about building data centers, ultimately inferences, there's a certain window of time, and you have to be under Several hundred milliseconds, but if you do that and you draw …”

“The biggest step for me is one gigawatt of a data center for AI basically costs fifty billion dollars in capex. And on an annual running basis, it costs between, like, another eight to nine eight to nine to maybe even eleven billion dollars to run.”

“It seems pretty clear to me, I think two years ago, I've got a blog post on this saying that, like, we're going to have to go to solar and batteries for AI data centers at scale and back then everyone was still talking about, like, oh, we're going to build SMR…”

“I put this out there when I wrote that because I do think that this is the beginning of a trend.”

“I think the highly energy intense workloads will converge around the low cost electricity places. You'll see a lot of that go to the Gulf. You'll see a lot of that go to Texas. And you're seeing that now, right, with Stargate and Abilene and all the big produc…”

“I've seen estimates that over half the cost of running an AI data center is the chips and the associated depreciation. The human cost, that R&D is actually a pretty high amount because hiring these AI researchers and all the software engineering Is meaningful.…”

“If we don't find some compelling solves, and I'll tell you what the two ideas were, but if we don't find some compelling solves, electricity rates will double in the next five years.”

“If you are, for example, building one large data center that only does training and it's not connected to a wide area network around the world, that's close to the users, it's hard to use that same infrastructure For inferencing because you can't go faster tha…”

“Like, AI data centers are like three, four percent of the US economy. Power, not economy. Or just data centers, period. Of that, like, two is regular data centers, and two is, like, AI data centers.”

“If we can build big data centers really quickly in, in you know, at the scale that traditional infrastructure projects would have taken 10 plus years, if we can do that in a few years, it could create a precedent where somebody could decide, you know what, I'm…”

“These projects get announced, and they're saying, we're gonna spend twenty billion dollars here, and then we're gonna create, like, a thousand jobs, or we're gonna create 300 jobs, and that is very significant. That will be good for the local economies in thes…”

“I'm allowing the people that are building to build their own electric plants, which nobody thought would happen.”

“Historically, a data center might lose 33% of the power or use it, 33% of that power for non-IT or information technology uses, and the remaining 66 or 67% goes into actual computations. Nowadays, with the increasingly customized design of these AI factories a…”

“We've got 50 to a hundred gigawatts of latent AI demand in the pipeline. It's just not gonna get built unless you have this capability of flexibility.”

“Data centers, which today are about four percent of American energy consumption, AI data centers are about five gigawatts of load, grow to 12% by the end of the decade. AI data centers could be anywhere up to 50 or even more gigawatts, to 25% of American load …”

“Farming alfalfa uses like a hundred X the water of AI data centers. Even by the end of the decade, it'll be the same.”

“Even by the end of the decade you know, the US will be like, 10% of our power will be AI data centers”

“The engineering project that we collectively as a country, as a society, as a world are undergoing right now, right? It's like projects like the New Deal, like pale in comparison, you know, the Apollo program pale in comparison to what we're doing right now.”

“All of the dollars that are going into the ground are being used. We're not building ahead of demand. In fact, we're clearly still behind demand”