zlacker

>>tedsan+(OP)
~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.

If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.

>>heyden+82
One possibility would be just to build their own power plants colocated with the datacenters and not interconnect at all.

>>cameld+jx
I like how you think this is possible.

>>zekrio+GQ
Lol, how is it not possible?

>>cameld+lV
It is, but at what cost?

>>zekrio+E21
https://www.global.toshiba/ww/products-solutions/nuclearener...

Two Toshiba 4S reactors at the 50 MW version can cost about $3,000,000,000.

Two of those produces 100 MW.

They don't require refueling for around 30 years. $6,000,000,000 to power a 100 MW datacenter when we're talking about $500,000,000,000 is not too dramatic. Especially consider the amortized yearly cost.

>>cbozem+aa2
Maybe they could build nuclear but they could just as easily build solar with battery backup or natural gas. Lots of industrial facilities have natural gas cogeneration with the grid as a backup. If you can't get a grid connection at all due to permitting, you could just forego the backup. The reliability wouldn't be as good, but in a distributed datacenter there are ways of building in fault tolerance.

If these guys really have $500 billion, they're going to find a way to get electricity.