Prediction Not checkable as stated
AI token costs will asymptotically approach the fundamental cost of power
“I think the answer will increasingly become yes in the future as the cost of inference, the cost of token generation asymptotically approaches the cost of power, which is the only real operational expense input into the Into the cost of intelligence generation…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sivaram: 50-100 GW of AI Data Centers Cannot Be Built Without Flexibility
“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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sivaram: AI data centers could consume 25% of US electricity by 2035
“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 …”
Insight
Mandating more than ten percent clean material procurement by 2030 will fail
“If we, if you try and make it a larger percentage of a supply chain from these enormous buyers early on in 2030, you'll fail. Because the technology simply cannot scale that quickly to meet extraordinary demand.”
Prediction Held up
Waste-oil aviation fuels cannot scale to meet double-digit jet fuel demand
“Today's generation is based on waste oils, fats, and greases. As you mentioned, Shale, they compete with food crops. They don't have great greenhouse gas reduction. Oh, and by the way, they don't scale. We're just, there's no way we're going to get to, you kno…”
Assertion Contradicted
Inflation Reduction Act erases green premiums across most heavy industrial sectors
“In all of our different sectors now, cement, steel maybe not aviation fuels entirely, in almost all of our sectors, it is now as inexpensive to build the clean alternative as it is the dirty one, thanks to the IRA.”
Assertion Supported
Data centers drive 94% of PJM load growth, 17% of US power
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Power rates historically rose slower in regions with faster data center growth
“And, you know, some data shows that in areas where data centers grew more quickly, rates actually increased more slowly.”
Assertion Supported
Sivaram: Over 100GW of stranded grid capacity could power flexible data centers
“The grid is utilized at roughly 50% or less during most of the year, and therefore, we have all of this hundred plus gigawatts of stranded power capacity that could power AI factories connecting to the grid today if during those rare peak moments AI factories …”
Assertion Supported
Sivaram: Study shows AI workloads offer 18% to 55% power flexibility
“There's a March, 20, 26 paper that was published actually by Emerald's chief scientist, Professor Aisha Koskun at Boston University with Two others, both at BU and at Emerald AI, that shows a 18 to 55% power flexibility opportunity across a range of different …”
Assertion Supported
Emerald AI and Oracle migrated live inference queries to avoid winter peak
“So with Oracle, we showcased migrating AI workloads from one location, Virginia, to another, Chicago. And this was during the data winter, the Dominion winter peak period, the inference queries got rerouted in such a way that you were able to precisely meet th…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2026
Emerald and NVIDIA to deploy 100MW power-flexible AI factory in 2026
“I think later this year, as you know, Emerald and NVIDIA and some other partners, Digital BLT, Epri, Dominion, and PJM, we will put together the world's first, ah, A hundred megawatt commercial scale AI factory that is truly power flexible. It's custom designe…”
Assertion Contradicted
Sivaram: Data center power demand has more than doubled annually
“The power demand from data centers has more than doubled. Every year, the last several years, and that trend shows no sign of abating.”
Assertion Supported
Sivaram: Computing demand is more than quadrupling every year
“Compute demand is more than quadrupling every year, a four X increase every year.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Aug 2030
Sivaram: AI data center racks hit 132 kilowatts, heading toward 1 megawatt
“Today, I just was in a data center in Silicon Valley seeing a brand new deployment of NVIDIA GB 200, the Blackwell generation. The rack is 132 kilowatts. It's liquid cooled, and we're headed toward one megawatt rack.”
Assertion Supported
Frankel: Only 10% of Databricks Cluster Workloads Are Non-Preemptible
“It was surprising to me, by the way, to hear that he anticipated that just 10% Of the workloads on a representative Databricks cluster were non-preemptible. In other words, they absolutely could not be paused or delayed in any way.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
NASA's Apollo mission semiconductor procurement catalyzed the creation of Silicon Valley
“In the 19 sixties NASA provided the early market for integrated circuits in the Apollo mission. And that's why we have Silicon Valley.”
Assertion Supported
Google reached 1 GW of flexible data center capacity across five utilities
“Google now, ah, has reached a gigawatt of contracted flexible capacity across, I think, five different utility territories, at least some of whom, ah, are willing to provide some of these benefits.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Data centers will accept power curtailment tiers for faster grid interconnection
“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 …”
Insight
Sivaram: AI data center load profiles drastically change within a year
“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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sivaram: Hundreds of AI Customers Willing to Accept Power Availability Adjustments
“Given the necessity now, I think there's a range of AI customers, and we've talked to hundreds, who are willing to tolerate small levels of changed power availability.”
Assertion Supported
Advance market commitments pioneered pneumococcal and COVID-19 vaccine commercialization
“Those advanced market commitments have enabled us to get the pneumococcal vaccine a couple decades ago. Most recently, advanced market commitments brought COVID vaccines onto the market, right? It was the U.S. Government saying, I promised to buy X doses of th…”
Insight
Advance market commitments require decades of prior technology development to succeed
“It's not a silver bullet. In all of the other examples from the other sectors, the technologies actually needed to be in development for the advanced market commitment to work. Right, mRNA vaccines have been in development for decades before we made an advance…”
Assertion Partly supported
First Movers Coalition secured $12 billion in 2030 clean technology commitments
“It's a partnership between the U.S. Government and the World Economic Forum, and it assembles a coalition that today is 66 companies, some of the biggest companies in the world, each of which is making a purchase commitment, an advanced market commitment, to b…”
Varun Sivaram