The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Behind-the-meter nuclear data centers have no credible case for decades
“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.”
Janous: US data center constraints will persist through 2030 and beyond
“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…”
Janous: Vast majority of computation will remain in 100MW+ data centers
“I still believe that the vast majority of the computation is going to be done in large data centers. Large being defined as hundred megawatts or more in my world.”
Solar and batteries have killed Texas's $9,000 per megawatt-hour price spikes
“The only argument, you know, you ever had for building something like a baseload generator in Texas is that sometimes the price would go to 5000 or 9000 dollars a megawatt hour, but with the massive amounts of solar and storage coming out of the grid, which yo…”
Janous: Traditional colocation data centers lack the energy talent for AI.
“And those companies that, that filled the gap in the last era are really not particularly well equipped, equipped to fill it in this era because the depth of energy talent at those companies is actually quite thin.”
Janous: Compute demand will exceed available power supply through 2030.
“It's possible, though I suspect that given the, my fundamental belief is that the demand for compute, let's just say through twenty-thirty, will exceed the available power in the market. And therefore, the marginal value of the next watt or gigawatt, frankly, …”
Janus: AEP will not connect 90 gigawatts in next decade
“There's no reason to believe that AEP is going to connect 90 gigawatts in the next 10 years.”
Janus: AI Training Loads Will Not Run as Intermittent Renewable-Following Workloads
“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…”
Janus: Powering Gigawatt-Scale Data Centers with Solar and Storage Is Not Feasible
“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.”
Janus: Nuclear Power Will Not Solve Data Center Bottlenecks This Decade
“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.”
Janus: Hyperscaler climate targets are probably not achievable on time
“And so there is, I think at this point, a point of coming to grips with the fact that those targets are probably not achievable in the time horizons that they had all set.”
Janus: Hyperscalers have deprioritized day-one clean power for immediate grid capacity
“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…”
Janus: Chip efficiency gains will not reduce AI data center power demand
“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…”
Janous: Data centers use little water compared to agriculture and golf courses
“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.”
Janous: Tech companies' presentation of AI is driving data center backlash
“So I do think the, you know, the tech companies have, you A real issue around how AI has been presented, you know, and that is causing a lot of this backlash as well.”
Janous: GE Vernova builds 2.6 GW capacity for one-gigawatt data center
“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.”
Janous: On-site power plants make data center community backlash worse
“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.”
Janous: Taking data centers off-grid prevents broader electricity rates from decreasing
“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.”
Off-grid Texas data centers pay up to 10x more for electricity
“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…”
Transmission lines act as direct substitutes for local baseload power generation
“The transmission line itself is a substitution for baseload power, because if you can move more power over more space, you are Reducing the need to have to generate that power on the other end of that congestion. So in that sense, transmission and generation a…”
Virtual power plants will soon bridge grid capacity for large data centers
“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.”
Land constraints will keep on-site renewables a niche data center solution
“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 …”
Janous: Building simultaneous remote gigawatt data centers will cause severe labor delays.
“But if all, if too many people try to do that all at once, you're going to create a labor problem and you're going to have significant delays in getting a lot of this infrastructure stood up.”
Janous: Securing electric power creates a defensible competitive moat in AI.
“And so not to mention the fact that the ability to acquire and collect those electrons then in some ways creates a moat against other folks that would want to try to do the same thing. So the more electrons That you can get a hold of, especially in the AI worl…”
Janous: AI companies pay huge speed premiums because base infrastructure is cheap.
“The cost of the base infrastructure for my end product is actually really low. And when I say base infrastructure, I talk about land, you know, power a data center shell, you know, those things are relatively inexpensive. In the grand scheme of operating, you …”
Janous: Continuous data center loads benefit grids by improving infrastructure cost recovery.
“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.”
Janous: Full-stack data center CapEx, including GPUs, costs $25M per megawatt.
“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”
Janous: Utilities should require proof of capital for gigawatt grid requests.
“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.…”
Janus: AI technology is advancing faster than electric utilities can build power
“The problem we were going to have was going to be whether we would have enough power to support this technology that was moving at a pace that, as you know, moves way faster than the electric utility industry.”
Janus: AI training latency constraints require single-site gigawatt data centers
“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…”
Janous: AEP's data center demand forecast surged 275% in five months
“If you go even back to January of this year, PJM had Roughly four gigawatts of anticipated data center demand for AEP by 2030, and by May, AEP revised that up to closer to 15, in just five months, right?”
Janus: Standard 48-Hour Diesel Backup Is Probably a Data Center Relic
“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…”
Janus: Every New Dublin Data Center Must Install On-Site Gas Generation
“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.”
Janous: Data centers spurred massive civic investment and job gains in Quincy
“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…”
Janous: Cloverleaf refuses to sign NDAs with government officials
“I mean, for us and for Cloverleaf, we don't sign NDAs with government officials. Like, we don't think that's good practice.”
Janous: Data center industry fails by fighting emotional backlash with facts
“I think the industry has tried to attack this with facts. And really miss the emotional resonance of, like, people just aren't happy about this stuff right now.”
Janous: Electricity prices did not rise for 100 years during grid expansion
“Electricity prices did not go up for a hundred years as we massively expanded the grid.”
Janous: Terrestrial data centers will remain the vast majority through 2030
“I just look at the pie of total data centers by 20 30 and pick your date in the future. I'm a big believer of terrestrial data centers are still going to be, like, the vast majority of the way we build data centers. Like, I just don't, I'm not sure how much it…”
AI training data centers are beginning to abandon backup generators
“I think with some of the AI training sites, we've seen it's more of a move away from backup generators.”
Permitting gigawatt-scale diesel backup generators is nearly impossible in most markets
“I think for those kind of sites, it would be very difficult to Permit that scale of diesel generators in most markets.”
Utilities evaluate data center interconnections on peak capacity, not annual energy
“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…”
Janous: Data center developers can enter utility queues for just $10,000.
“And some of them are big tech companies, and some of them are just two guys with a truck that decided they were going to be data center developers, and they go get a queue position, and they have to pay 10,000 dollars, that's it, to get in the queue.”
Janous: Power capacity in 2027 is worth significantly more than in 2032.
“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.”
Janus: Microsoft's energy demand grew from hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts
“Over that decade, we had gone from a baseline of, you know, a couple hundred megawatts, and we were growing at a relatively rapid pace, but that's also kind of a small denominator. So the incremental tranches every year that we had to go procure were measured …”
Janus: Cloud Apps Cannot Seamlessly Move Regions During Data Center Outages
“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…”
Janus: Data Centers Account for Nearly 20% of Ireland's Electricity
“It's almost 20% of the entire country of Ireland's electricity are data centers, and they're almost all in Dublin.”
Janous: Land represents just 1% of a data center's 15-year total cost.
“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.”