data center

“We do consume over what data centers represent, like over one percent of global power consumption now, and growing, but not growing that much because energy efficiency of classical compute and of data centers Has been improving pretty rapidly.”

“I think it's going to be like data centers probably ultimately, which means like significant source of electricity load that from a climate perspective is neither good nor bad basically.”

“I realized, you guys are building a data center. It was like the two by four moment where I realized, I've already done this, and this is exactly the type of skill that you need to build these large EV charging stations.”

“These data centers generally speaking are somewhat price insensitive, but time sensitive. And when you have that dynamic it creates a different kind of an opportunity to say like, well, okay, we got to deliver power sooner, even if it is a little more expensiv…”

“So for example, it's been reported that the electric utility in Virginia, Dominion, has basically told data center developers that they don't have capacity. They can't serve additional data center demand in Northern Virginia, which is one of the biggest areas …”

“Computing, demand for computing has grown, as everyone knows, it's obvious, tremendously in the past 10 years. I think it's grown by about 10 X over that period. But over that same period, data center energy consumption Grew by just about 10%, which is actuall…”

“If the power sector isn't able to make it through this period and it results in People unable to build new manufacturing facilities, new data centers in a timely fashion. And if it results in kind of costs starting to spiral out of control, electricity costs s…”

“Data centers are probably the biggest driver of microgrids right now.”

“Most data centers in the world today, those backup power generation devices are diesel generators, right? Increasingly, they're becoming natural gas generators, but for most data centers, they're diesel generators.”

“I generally think on balance, it's good because those customer sets tend to be particularly progressive when it comes to climate issues, and they're willing to put their money where their mouth is and take some risks that, that others will not.”

“Northern Virginia, where, like, there is a, the queue for new load coming from data centers alone, I think, is larger than the entire capacity of the system today in that region.”

“The most flexible data center assets that we have seen, for better or for worse. A bunch of them are participating in demand response in ERCOT today.”

“I think people have this sense of the cloud as really being this sort of ethereal thing, and applications can just move around, and if one data center goes down, then, well, you can just move everything to another data center. That's not really how it works. W…”

“You know, if you go back a few years, you know, zero carbon energy day one was really becoming a non-negotiable that, you know, we wanted energy, wanted to be zero carbon. We wanted to have it Done, ready to go when we plug in the data center. I think the, pro…”

“There's no reason to believe that AEP is going to connect 90 gigawatts in the next 10 years.”

“Because those training models are in and of themselves a big machine, and so you can't, and this is not my forte and my area of expertise around the actual architecture inside of a training model, but my understanding of sort of the constraints there is that y…”

“If let's say Meta, for instance, finds a piece of land or a point on the grid where they can pull three gigawatts, Of power on one location. And then the next day, NVIDIA comes out with a chip that's twice as efficient. Is Meta going to build a 1.5 gigawatt da…”

“So I think it's a little bit overblown to say, and I think this is also true of Something like the conversation around crypto, but that these are highly curtailable loads that you could just, you know, attach a training model to a wind farm and only run it, yo…”

“It's almost 20% of the entire country of Ireland's electricity are data centers, and they're almost all in Dublin.”

“I will say that backup is probably a bit of a relic because when we first started building these data centers, 15 years ago, most of them were relatively small. They were five or 10 megawatts. They were connected at distribution voltage. So the standard was pu…”

“There are breathless reports coming out almost daily at this point claiming data centers could consume up to maybe 10% of U.S. Electricity by 2030. That was the high end of a recent EPRI report.”

“So now every new data center in Dublin is getting a natural gas generator behind the meter so it can be flexible and, you know, avoid that contribution to system peak.”

“You're not going to put solar in storage to supply a 500 to gigawatt, 500 megawatt to gigawatt scale data center. I mean, it's just not feasible.”

“The focus that these companies have right now is getting data centers online in the next, Two, three, four years, and nuclear is not going to solve that problem.”

“I think, and again, this is probably beyond my scope, but I think it really has to do with the size of the models and the latency, right? It takes too much time for light to travel larger distances, as hard as that is to believe. And so they tend to concentrat…”

“I think we're moving into a world where it's not It's not demand driven, it's supply driven. You know, and we talk about power, but I think it's more than just power. It's trades to build data centers, right?”

“It feels to me like the incentive for the foreseeable future as it pertains to designing everything that goes into the data center is minimize energy consumption.”

“And to Microsoft's credit, we did implement this where the data centers are being looked at to try to see how can we change the design so that we increase pollinators and habitat for pollinators so the fields around it get, have healthier yield”

“And at one time that was like, Two to three times the power was consumed in the back room, and then with the advent of PUE, people really focused on making data centers much more efficient, so now only about 10 to 20% of the power in a data center is consumed …”

“Today, the biggest consumer of cooling is data centers. So as we talk about AI and all the AI applications, all that doesn't exist without a significant amount of cooling to keep those servers warm and keep those data centers operating.”

“If you're saying you're going to build a gigawatt data center, Or you're holding on to a gigawatt of power in a queue position. At some point, you need to be able to point to billions of dollars of capital that you have access to build out that infrastructure.…”

“I mean, on a total cost basis, you know, over a fifteen-year period, and, you know, TCO is the way we think about it in the world, land is about one percent. Of the cost to operate a data center. You know, the full stack with servers and everything.”

“Having more data centers on the grid is good because they use power 8007 60 hours a year. So there's more cost recovery for more infrastructure in more hours if you have more data centers.”

“The cost of a data center today in terms of the full stack CapEx deployment all the way through GPUs is about 25 twenty-five million a megawatt or twenty-five billion a gigawatt”

“The value of a megawatt in twenty-twenty-seven is worth more than a value of a megawatt in twenty-thirty-two, because there's an assumption that by twenty-thirty-two, power will probably be more abundant, that will have sort of run through this cycle.”

“Even if you haircut the forecast growth in data centers and manufacturing by 80 or 90%, you still double the grid. And something I think we need to say more as an industry is doubling the grid is not the high-end reference case here. It's not the sort of what …”

“24 months ago, electric vehicles were the biggest driver of electrification growth, and now it's a distant third, and that happened stunningly quickly.”

“And certainly, so we're seeing that more and more, I think, as awareness of data centers and AIs growing, and there, people are starting to hear that that requires a lot of electricity. They become more interested in utilities.”

“At that scale, gigawatt scale, oh wait, we just found a gigawatt of capacity, does not exist anymore.”

“Virginia is, you know, 30, just under 34 terawatt hours of power consumed by data centers in 2020 three, and almost 26% of state power already going to that.”

“We spent more on data centers in terms of CapEx last year than hospitals. I didn't actually realize how much we spent on hospitals, to be honest with you. We spent thirty-one billion on data centers, twenty-seven billion on hospitals.”

“Generally speaking, I think we're moving into an era where grid connection is optional and should be optional. And that, you know, we should be able to, you know, operate these things fully off grid if necessary.”

“I was on the side of, we will see total capacity of data centers as measured in megawatts, or gigawatts, I guess, really double by twenty-thirty, and I was on the side that we will see it more than double.”

“The U the U S number from the report to Congress that just came out from LBL was something like on the order of two percent of the electricity in 20, 20, 20, 21 was data centers. And now in 20, 23, now, 2023, which is the last historical year we have, it's 4.4…”

“It would not surprise me if You know, we saw another doubling, but I would say, you know, probably that's about it. I think that's going to level out, and then people are going to be more efficient at what they're doing based on the history”

“So I think anyone who claims to know what's going to happen in twenty-thirty-five, the data center of electricity use, I think is just making it up.”

“We had about a six-fold increase in the compute output for data centers from 20 10 to 20 18, but electricity use went up a grand total of six percent over that period.”

“So for the year, 20, 22, the International Energy Agency did these projections. They did two of them in, in, in, 20, 24, and they started by trying to do history, and they looked at twenty-twenty-two, and the first study they released in January had a number t…”

“Data centers use a lot of energy, but you'll have to use a lot of very dirty energy to compensate how much more efficient you can make the process of identifying Sites for clean energy.”

“If you have low-cost, available, significant capacity electricity, you're fighting up against a data center, probably, or something else.”

“All of that is contributing to energy demand that is increasing for the first time in two decades. And that's a really material impact to the market, where we are going from a reality where demand was pretty stable since the financial crisis to a world where d…”

“What would really present a value proposition for the hyperscalers and the large co-location data centers would be if you can actually interconnect them to the grid more quickly if they're able to offer this flexibility.”

“When we ran the numbers, so like at that, that 0.25% load curtailment rate on average, we found that the number of hours in which Curtailment would be required. Some amount of curtailment would be 85 hours, but in 73 of those 85 hours, at least 50% of the new …”

“Lots of new data centers are, you mentioned this, right, bringing their own generation. And that could be renewables and batteries, but it's often natural gas generators. And they're doing that to increase time to power. I'm sorry, decrease time to power. Incr…”

“I don't know where this idea came from of 24 seven. They are not 24 seven loads, and it's critical to clarify this. So the servers may be 24 seven, right, the chips themselves, but there's an enormous amount of cooling infrastructure and other infrastructure a…”

“At 0.5% flexibility or curtailment of the new data center load, you could add up to 98 gigawatts of new data centers across the U.S. And at 0.25% curtailment of the new load, you could add 76 gigawatts.”

“The thermal load is just as large as the electrical load within data centers”

“We really get down to three, four cents, including all the capital that we installed there, and we model actually escalation on the electricity side by 10% every year, and natural gas also going up by five percent every year. But still, at the end of the analy…”

“You might think that installing just a small gas generator, diesel generator might be the solution, but it's actually kind of stranded investment. Because, I mean, after, let's say the utility comes online and gives you the power of three or four years, you ha…”

“And the analysis is that we did for these two cases actually suggested you can run 100% grid independent, right? And then it just becomes a redundancy challenge for the generators.”

“We've learned the top five things that the hyperscalers and people building data centers want is, in this order, speed, speed, speed, cost, and carbon. All of those are important, but speed is the thing that is driving a lot of this.”

“Anyway, we have talked before a little bit about the build-out of natural gas that is planned in the United States and a bunch of other countries that is being driven by data centers.”

“The challenge there is that between permitting and technology development that needs to happen, you're probably talking about, you know, mid 20 thirties before you see that become a real play.”

“There's only so much connection capacity in the system and the ability to sort of expand connection capacity is reliant on utilities who are then in turn reliant on the regulatory commissions to give them authority to build new things. And the timescales at wh…”

“Underhyped in the sense that I like Respectfully disagree with Nick, which is just look at NVIDIA's earning calls. Like people are buying those chips and powering them up. So, and I think companies are, I spent a lot of time being incredibly creative about fin…”

“Yes, I think we'll see a lot of batteries at data centers. I think we'll see a lot of batteries on the grid next to data centers. I think we'll see a lot of batteries That are on the grid far away from data centers. I think we're just going to see a lot of bat…”

“I don't think there is a lot of new merchant gas being developed. Mostly what's happening is it's other utilities saying we need it for, cause we need more capacity or it's data centers and there'll be the longterm offtake on the project.”

“There's like 1400 New data centers planned in the United States alone. And over a thousand of those are all large scale.”

“I mean, some of the most recent stats, it has .five percent vacancy rate, which is phenomenal.”

“Doing behind the meter, you know, becoming a power generation capability, I think is a short term gap. Nobody would be investigating that if we didn't have the constraint.”

“What we're really seeing is inference. Can come in, in like, five-ish megawatt blocks, and you can solve for it a bit differently. Now, the densification is still there, and then the private AI pieces, there's hot spots where it can be, you know, a couple of m…”

“From Duquesne Light, which has a relatively small service territory, and they said that there are four projects in advanced stages of connection, essentially, in their service territory. That could add 40% to their demand, and one really big hyperscale thing c…”

“We're now in a place that we probably haven't seen since the U.S. Was being electrified full stop, where people are showing up and saying, hello, I have one thing that will materially change the shape of load and demand pretty much forever.”

“I don't think that really anyone has got the muscle for this because it's not been in anybody's lived experience really. And so we're having to think about it pretty fresh.”

“If you have a lot of backup generation, you might fire up the backup generation. Often you're not allowed to because your diesel generator will violate its air permit if you use it regularly.”

“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 …”

“The power demand from data centers has more than doubled. Every year, the last several years, and that trend shows no sign of abating.”

“First, because data centers aren't actually operating at nameplate peak most of the time anyway.”

“A data center will not do a single thing for its lifetime, right? A massive data center, for example, may initially be configured and specified to train a large language model, and then you'll finish training the large language model, and then you'll do other …”

“That feels to me like it is more readily available to the hyperscalers who have lots and lots of data centers probably within one region than it is to Others. The temporal one, in theory, available to anybody.”

“So it does take some work to get it, and you're right, no one's done it at a, at any real scale yet but I think we're gonna see it pretty soon.”

“That's still going to be a relatively small percentage of the overall market because we can't put everything in West Texas, right? We still are going to have The tendency to want to be closer to major metros where that sort of land availability is going to be …”

“The problem we're trying to solve here is not that I need a 24 seven generation to match a 24 seven load. It's that I need to solve for The summer peaks and the winter system peaks in order to connect alone. That's what a utility does, and I think it's a, I th…”

“If you look at it in a place like Texas, for instance, where the average price for electricity on any given day is actually pretty low. Like the real time price may be sitting around 20 dollars a megawatt hour. So you go off grid in Texas and you're paying som…”

“I don't think there's a credible argument for behind the meter nuclear at a data center in the near future. And by near future, I mean, The next couple of decades.”

“This notion of, like, on-site versus off-site can be a little bit more flexible if you're willing to take into account the fact that as long as you're co-locating at the constraint, that's solving the problem, and now you have more tools in your toolkit, inclu…”

“I think it's going to end up being the minority of new data centers, not the majority of new data centers.”

“18 months ago, the survey, you know, like respondents said, one percent of the survey respondents said they will use on-site power that is not connected to the grid. Two months ago when we did the same survey, 29% of the respondents said they will use on-site …”

“I think once they get used to this and understand all the advantages of this digitally purpose-built on-site power, they are not going to switch back.”

“We are finally building high electricity intensity AI factories. These are, these data centers are AI factories. They have been the exception and not the rule. They are now going to have to follow the rule.”

“My sense is that all those two-hour battery storage deals that we just mentioned at data centers, they still have gensets, likely diesel for those longer duration emergency events, and they're not at all mutually exclusive, and in fact, it may be that predomin…”

“Whereas now you're pricing power for the first time in, in generations, right? For certain equipment providers or certain labor producers.”

“Instead of the design portion taking, call it six to nine months of your critical path. We can massively collapse that period of time. And that's really important for these data center projects to kind of accelerate how quickly we can actually build them.”

“And if it turns out that maybe there are diminishing returns from training larger and larger models, or maybe we run out of data because we've exhausted all the data that's available on the internet. When those things happen, it may be that demand for these GP…”

“Space cooling, so just aircon and buildings is gonna be, like, 10% of the total growth. And data centers are right around eight percent.”

“Data centers are gonna, I mean, even, even on a global basis, I think they're gonna move up this ranking before too long.”

“That, you know, with this increasing demand, it's gonna create a ton of opportunity for businesses that solve the grid optimization problem that create software, and again, AI. So this data center and AI growth can actually contribute to improving delivery on …”

“There's plenty of space. There appear to be plenty of chips but there isn't enough power.”

“We've seen this in places like Ireland where there's a moratorium now on data centers. Energy prices have gone up so much. Rate payers have been forced to bear those extra costs.”

“Now the backplane voltage of the racks will be 800 volts or even higher. And then you can use a SST based solution to go from medium voltage, 34 KV all the way to 800 volts with no gray space rooms with UPSs and power distribution panels and anything like that…”

“And you can remove 70% of the stuff in the in the electrical diagram and a similar amount of footprint”

“I would like to see them get serious about exploiting distributed capacity. I think that's faster and cheaper than on-site generation if we can get the financial and institutional arrangements lined up the right way.”

“Josh Hawley in the Senate and somebody else, I think introduced a bill that would essentially mandate data centers to go off grid. I, my presumption is that doesn't pass.”

“How, how long can we, how much time will it take to build out the transmission capacity necessary to interconnect these mega sites, gigawatt scale sites to new power supply, ideally, you know, carbon free power supply. And in many markets, right, that's runnin…”

“In a world where we're so constrained, on the grid side, it seems inevitable to be that that is going to happen to some degree, and that the engineering challenge is going to get at least partially solved.”

“Historically, you know, there were these tier one markets, like Northern Virginia, or Chicago, or Phoenix, or whatever, Atlanta, and they were where 90% of the demand for new data centers was going to be, and there's still that. But it is broadening out quickl…”

“Massive data centers on the grid, massive data centers off-grid, small data centers on the edge, huge data center clusters in space. Each of these might get built. Actually, each of them probably will get built”

“There's like, 50 gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation and development at data centers, right? And they, and some people have interpreted that to be, oh, 50 gigawatts of off-grid data centers getting built. It's actually close to zero of those that are true…”

“The reality is, is, again, even at 30 cents a watt, and if we're made in the U.S., we are still the cheapest and fastest thing to deploy in pretty much every scenario.”

“We are seeing data centers like, you know, and even retail Energy providers who are coming to a utility hand in hand and saying, look, we want to put a data center here. I'm the retail energy provider. I'm going to provide this data center with energy. I neede…”

“Like data centers need firm baseload power wherever they can get it. That is Is number one on their list. It'll always be number one because reliability is their number one concern for data centers.”

“It takes three years to build them out, and there's a waiting list for three years to even get them.”

“Like, sustainability was number one on everyone's list. In the U.S., it is not anymore.”

“They're not the answer. They are supplemental energy that can help, and they're kind of filling a gap until, you know, more jet generation comes online, and depends on what form of that jet generation can be.”

“So you were going through this kind of like chaotic phase at the moment, and it'll last for like probably like three years where whatever you can put together to get yourself online, you are going to do it.”

“And, you know, some data shows that in areas where data centers grew more quickly, rates actually increased more slowly.”

“I believe that if electric power utilities and grid operators offered these, a range of different service tiers, just like on the compute side, the cloud operators offer a range of different service tiers to their end AI customers, innovation would solve this …”

“We're going to put a lot of batteries behind the meter at data centers. Like, I'm pretty convinced that that's going to happen.”

“The latest numbers show that in January of this year, NERC forecasts a summer peak increase of 224 gigawatts, almost all of which will come from data centers. Data centers now account for 94% of PJM's projected peak load growth, and by 20:30 EPRI forecast that…”

“Many of our data centers aim for four nines of, I mean, minutes of downtime a year maximum, which as you said has a large amount of costs associated with it.”

“No, it is not intrinsic and we should be thinking about lower reliability power delivery overall.”

“You don't strictly need a gigawatt of capacity to be able to do useful work. You probably don't even need a hundred megawatts of capacity. It gets a little bit more interesting than that because of, let's say, co-located compute and storage and networking and …”

“Because usually what's happening is that if the data center is operating off grid, it's temporary. It's a bridge power situation. Eventually they're going to get connected to the grid.”

“And if this data center boom continues for longer than the next three to five years, if it's really a robust trend that is gonna, you know, be, Decade plus, you know, for the foreseeable future, then I don't see any other option besides going to something like…”

“That is, of course, driven by the just extraordinary boom in demand from data centers that is happening right now, and I'm pretty confident is going to continue to be happening for the next three to five years, and honestly, who knows after that”

“The IEA recently came out with some data recently on global electricity demand growth, and it turns out that last year in 2025 from about, from a global standpoint, there was almost exactly as much electricity demand growth around the world from electric vehic…”

“And if you do bloom, you're basically islanded for life. Either that, or maybe you get good at some point, and then you move your fuel cells to some other location but you can't use them as backup. It's not a very efficient solution for backup purposes.”

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

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”