Prediction certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Sharp: Data centers built for spiky training runs will face major failures

Chris Sharp · The state of play of data center development · Jun 12, 2025 · at 25:58

Digital Realty CTO Chris Sharp explains why speculative AI data center builds face severe operational risks once temporary spike demand fades.

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“There's going to be some probably written about very big challenges and failures where they wanted a total capacity block, but they couldn't support the densification, or they were just building for the spike. It was very spiky, but the longer term utilization is much lower than anybody had projected.”

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