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 27 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: 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: 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.”
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: 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.”
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…”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
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.”
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: 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.”