Data Center

“For a mid-sized utility, most of the kind of, Hundreds of megawatt scale data centers we're seeing today would add 10%, 20%, 30%, or more if we're getting up to gigascale data centers to the utility's total load.”

“We're now seeing the first, like, announcements from utilities of going to regulators and requesting rate decreases as a result of large loads in their territory. We've seen a few of those now.”

“And when you do control for other variables that might bias the analysis Epri found that basically, on average, data centers are lowering customer bills a little bit already. So we are seeing, it's not a major impact, it's something like six percent, but data …”

“Data centers are absolutely going to be pushing up rates, and other factors, right, in the supply chain. Rates are going up for most people in most places, I think, in the years to come.”

“So at a global level, data centers are one factor among many, but I'd say they're the biggest factor that is causing this global Growth in demand for electricity, which is happening so quickly now, especially because of data centers and the urgency with which …”

“There's a demand shock and supply chains, like basically every step in the supply chain for equipment, For the electricity system to deploying that equipment and getting it online and hooking everything up is bottlenecked and cannot keep up with demand. And be…”

“Two-thirds of the expenditures they're making today across utilities are non-negotiable, and it's, Has nothing to do with growth, right? All that stuff would be happening even if the data center, boom, were not happening. And so, all that stuff is getting more…”

“At the local level, data centers seem to on balance, probably decrease electricity prices currently. And at the macro level, they are definitely a factor contributing to an increase in electricity prices.”

“Energy is a pretty small share of the total cost of goods sold for that That data center, right? It's something like five to 10% of the total cost.”

“If I was taking a God's eye view, it would be extremely inefficient to build all of these data centers and replicate this data engineering process and train these very large models when in fact you could probably consolidate a lot of these efforts but it seems…”

“The most expensive part of a delivery of a GPU is if it's late, I'm still paying rent for that data center space.”

“Rubens are liquid cooled. But most of these data centers don't have liquid cooling installations already approved”

“I mean, I'm of the belief they're going to switch their position back to being pro data centers because they just are following the wave here.”

“We've seen that in Loudoun County, Virginia, the average taxpayers' property taxes went down by 6000 dollars because they're getting all this data center revenue.”

“In the policy document that I worked on, the executive order that I worked on in December, we expressly said that data centers remain a state and local decision.”

“There was a fantastic story just in the last week about Quincy Washington building a fifteen million dollar aquatic center and they have a hundred and fifty million dollar state of the art school and their unemployment rate has gone from like 29% to six percen…”

“And if you look at the actual facts, like, data centers do not use that much water relative to, you know, fill in the blank, almonds, avocados, golf courses, you know, so.”

“Google maybe is the best at this, have a playbook where you address all of those things as close to upfront as you can, and you offer a lot in exchange to the community.”

“The objective truth, particularly today, is that a data center coming into a community tends to lower rates because nowadays, you You know, the deal that the utility is striking with the data center is basically guaranteed to do that, sort of the whole point.”

“In fact, I was talking to Someone from GE Vernova yesterday, and he was talking about for this gigawatt data center, they're having to build 2.6 gigawatts of capacity across generation and batteries and everything else.”

“Do they really want a data center plus a power plant next door? That also seems like not the right solution. Like, I think that's, Worse than a data center connected to the grid.”

“It's fine micro, but I would even say, I mean, if you believe that a larger denominator is actually good for lowering electricity rates over time, it's actually negative in that you're taking that denominator off the grid.”

“I would bet on this being the case for the next couple of years that it gets worse before it gets better. Partially because of the political timing that you described, it's just there currently where we stand today, there is no political advantage to being the…”

“All the stuff we thought we were going to build in this country, or thought we could build, a lot of that's not going to get built, because of all the things we've just been talking about. Like, I think that, and this problem is going to persist for the forese…”

“I think building out the data centers is, is going to be a bottleneck.”

“People look at data centers and say, oh, it's a big Costco box, and there's two parking, two cars in the parking lot, and all of that is being driven automatically, so there's no jobs. I call BS on that because if you think about whether it's around energy, Li…”

“We tend to co-locate with, you know, optimizing for places that already have those things readily available. So data centers, for example, that's a spot that's really great for a co-location because they already have That infrastructure in place. And they also…”

“Particularly with behind the meter power generation, when a data center goes in, It transforms a town like tax revenue. It doesn't double it like 10 X's and it is revitalizing all of these like dying small towns all over America.”

“Like there is an organized CCP funded campaign. I think against data centers here in America. Like I think a lot of it gets laundered through TikTok and it's just tragic because the other thing that's happening is this is re-industrializing America.”

“If you're open AI or you're anthropic, the hundreds of billions in free cash flow that you need in order to pay back the debt that you're taking on in order to accommodate these data center build outs in order to get the next big training run, it's totally exi…”

“You'd have missing zero buyers for a data center that is 95% uptime. I'm that first buyer. I will buy 95% uptime.”

“The backlash is about that AI sucks and it is inhuman. No one has ever seen an AI video or read an AI essay. They like, intuitively dislike this experience. There's like a visceral feeling to this. And so the trying to stop the data centers, I think is about t…”

“Data centers are going to be three percent of GDP.”

“So let me just make a statement here, which is, I believe the grid has enough existing latent capacity to connect the majority, if not all of the data centers today.”

“And if you look at a data center, for example, that's like, at a 90% degree, that's an MEP box, basically. So you have cooling systems, you have electrical systems, and you have a lot of mechanical system that sits inside that, so.”

“And the question flips around, which is, if I have, you know, a gigawatt of power with land and fiber, is someone going to put a data center there? It's like, yes, absolutely, right?”

“Residuals for private jets are, like, extremely strong these days. And a big part of the reason is people are taking jet engines off old planes and repurposing them as turbines to power data centers.”

“You're 500 to 600,000 electricians short just for data centers. Broadband, 150,000. You can't build submarines because we don't have pipe fitters and plumbers.”

“The way that I try to analogize this loosely, and this is very loose, is that data centers from the context of many capital providers are real estate. They're really just multi-tenant apartment buildings. It just so happens there's no humans in the apartment b…”

“This is a project that would require wholesale replacement of most of the hardware and probably changes in the cooling system and probably changes in other aspects of these data centers continuously and probably, you know, depending on the math, anywhere from …”

“So we have some GPUs that are failing inside of modern data centers on an 18 month cycle, some that are failing on a much longer period.”

“And so the Chinese premier has been recently cautioning the provincial governors, stop building so many data centers because this is now the new thing.”

“I expect you'll see the same phenomenon, albeit with a little less social consequences once all of this turns out to be, it'll be much like what happened with their overbuilding in apartment buildings and residential and industrial space over the last decade.”

“This is going to move the data center game out of the VCs and into the big leagues.”

“And of course the chips are 50% of the data center build out cost.”

“You're going to see optic chips with which are very, very energy compliant. So when people talk about the data centers and the energy sucks, that's going to change.”

“The reason we charge rent based on, on kilowatts is it is the limiting factor in the building.”

“And so by doing offsite manufacturing, putting together large components of our data centers offsite, it allows for a safer, more diverse, and more reliable product, right? Safer for the employees, more diverse, because giving somebody, hey, you can be here fr…”

“It is completely normal to talk about gigawatt campuses today.”

“The reason behind those outages is mainly the cooling and systems and power generation and connectivity systems, because data centers were designed, engineered from a civil engineering point of view.”

“And the reality is, like, given the deals that are being cut now, when a data center goes in, electricity prices actually generally go down for everyone around there because of behind the meter deals.”

“And this is like, data centers are like, are in a lot of ways the best thing to happen for blue-collar wages in my lifetime.”

“The difference between inference engineering for the data center and for production workloads versus inference engineering for local AI is that we start with fundamentally like different constraints and different goals. With local AI, it's how do I fit this mo…”

“You know, just having a data center and being a dumb, you know, essentially, like, rack provider is not actually, like, a great long-term business. It's pretty good now, but that's why, like, these companies, like CoreWeave, they want to offer services on top …”

“The way we share it with politicians in our areas, for instance, to say, well, the new data center are not going to use more water than a car wash.”

“95, 97% of the data centers that are existing out there are cooled by air, the air conditioning approach.”

“One gigawatt, well, generates one gigawatt, roughly, of heat. One gigawatt is roughly one nuclear plant.”

“And a third one which is something that we working on, it's to reuse that heat to produce electricity. And if you produce electricity, well, you reduce the electricity that's needed to power the data center as well, which I think is going to be the future beca…”

“Because when you think about a data center, the power consumption, it's roughly 60% of the power is being used to compute and 40% is being used to cool.”

“When we started on that journey right before COVID it was roughly one data center a year. That was being built, and today, one a week, and 50% of them are in the United States, 30% are in China, and 20% everywhere else”