Insight
Janus: 2010s flat data center power was driven by cloud migration, not efficiency
“What was happening is you had a lot of businesses shutting down their own very inefficient data centers that were using multiples of the amount of electricity that a hyperscale data center would use. And the hyperscale data center could absorb that with signif…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Janus: 2x more efficient AI chips will lead tech giants to deploy 2x more chips
“And, you know, I had someone ask me the other day, well, what happens if, you know, if NVIDIA comes out with a chip that's twice as efficient? And my response to that is, well, then Meta or Microsoft or Google will plug in twice as many chips. If they have the…”
Opinion
Janus: Power availability, not chip supply, is the primary constraint for AI
“Absolutely power. Absolutely. I think, you know, six to 12 months ago, I think a lot of the companies were concerned about chip availability, but I think everyone has come around to realize that that is not going to be the biggest constraint.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Janus: Utilities Can Meet Load Growth Without Heavy Natural Gas Buildout
“I think we can. I think there is a lot of levers that we have at our disposal, you know, and I have, I've had empathy for my friends in the southeast. I know that they're under a lot of pressure, and I know that, you know, they, they're at the tip of the spear…”
Insight
Janus: Carbon Accounting Allows Net-Zero Claims While Utilities Add Gas
“Both the things can be true that a company could be a hundred percent zero carbon by one measure, and a utility is building gas plants to support their load, so, and that's the problem, right? The carbon accounting rules don't necessarily connect the dots in a…”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Janus: Advanced nuclear and fusion will not solve grid problems this decade
“They're not solving any problems this decade, right? That is a 20 thirties and probably a late 20 thirties. Opportunity.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Janis: Electricity supply, not GPU shortages, will bottleneck AI growth
“We'll find a way to make more chips. There's a lot of capital in that space. I, I'm more concerned about can the electrons keep up with the growth.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Janis: Grid bottlenecks will prevent data centers from doubling energy use quickly
“I'm skeptical that we're actually going to achieve that growth rate without some significant movement in terms of how fast we're investing in grid infrastructure.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Janus: Most utility employees have never worked during an era of load growth
“Most people that work at a utility today have never worked at a utility during an era of growth.”
Assertion Supported
Janis: Hyperscaler electricity procurement tranches have reached gigawatt scale
“The tranche sizes each year that you're having to go out and procure are now being measured in the gigawatt scale. So you're no longer immaterial to utilities load forecast. In fact, in many cases, you are the utilities load forecast.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Janis: Nuclear and fusion will not address near-term power demand
“I definitely think that we over-index on counting on, quote, energy miracles, because, again, going back to what we were talking about before, it takes a long time to build this stuff. So we are not going to have significant contribution of, say, nuclear energ…”
Insight
Janis: Computing efficiency gains increase total energy use due to endless demand
“The only time that efficiency is going to Reduce the input needed for any process is when you're starting to exhaust the demand for that resource, right? And when you think about something like data, we're nowhere close to satiating human demand for data, whic…”
Assertion Supported
Janis: RMI study shows GETs unlock over 6 GW on PJM grid
“There was a great RMI study that just came out very recently that looked at the PJM system and determined that you could unlock in excess of six gigawatts of extra capacity, and this is, I mean, PJM's a 90 gigawatt system, so six gigawatts is not nothing. That…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Janis: The US faces a massive deficit of powered land
“We're going to have a huge deficit of powered land in this country to serve, again, not just data centers, but also all the domestic manufacturing that's looking for the same thing and hydrogen and other things that are also going to be looking for clean energ…”
Insight
Janus: Grid Capacity Shortfalls Only Occur During Limited Peak Hours Annually
“There's plenty of power most of the time. There's, you know, a number of hours a year where we don't have enough power, and so that's really what we're trying to solve for.”
Assertion Supported
Janus: Amazon Talen Nuclear Deal Uses Existing Capacity, Not Net New
“Amazon Talon deals is, it's sort of a corollary to what John's talking about, where, you know, what you're doing is saying, Go, go to where the power is... Here you're just saying go to where the capacity is, right? And you could argue whether it's clean or no…”
Insight
Janus: Data Center Siting Shifted from Fiber to Eyeballs to Power
“If you look at the history of the cloud industry, it started with a focus on fiber, right? Get as close to the network as possible. That's why you have concentrations in places like Northern Virginia and Amsterdam, because those were some of the biggest networ…”
Assertion Supported
Janis: Big tech data centers account for at least 15-20 GW
“Even if you just take the, all the big tech companies and ignore the rest of the data centers, that alone is, is probably at least 15 to 20 gigawatts of capacity.”
Insight
Janis: Utility Capacity Shortages Are Usually Peak-Hour Issues, Not Year-Round
“Because the thing that I think people that work in this industry understand, but most people don't understand, is when a utility says that they don't have power, they don't mean that most of the time there's not power. They just mean there might be a handful o…”
Assertion Supported
Janus: Big tech hyperscalers grew from hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts by 2020
“Early in the two, you know, 2010 time frame, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, you know, they maybe all had a few hundred megawatts of data center capacity. Well, now you get to the end of that decade, now they're all sitting on a few gigawatts of capacity”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Janis: Microsoft had 100 to 200 MW data center capacity in 2011
“I think when I joined Microsoft in 2011, there was somewhere between a 102 hundred megawatts of data center capacity, which is not nothing, but compared to what it is today is pretty minuscule.”
Insight
Janis: Grid-enhancing tech installs quickly by outfitting existing infrastructure
“It is, it's very low impact, and you can install these things very quickly, I mean, you're not reconductoring. You're not running new lines. You're simply outfitting existing infrastructure with sensors. This can happen really quickly.”
