Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/ai-data-centers...

Up the road from me (Licking County, Ohio), two new dedicated gas-turbine generating plants are being built to serve new data centers. The (24-inch, 12-mile) gas pipeline to serve them was built over the coldest part of winter -- the contractor were obviously scrambling to get it done and invoice it before the bubble pops. They had a huge number of crews working on it simultaneously, and nearly around the clock, to get it done faster. The wait for gas turbines is still, as far as I am aware, five years. The data centers and power plants are one road over from the Intel fab. None of this stuff will ever open. It will all be white elephants.

The numbers here are staggering:

> if run at full strength for a year, Colossus [xAI's new datacenter] would use as much electricity as 200,000 American homes. When fully operational [...] this facility and two other xAI data centers nearby will require nearly two gigawatts of power. Annually, those facilities could consume roughly twice as much electricity as the city of Seattle.

> Even conservative analyses forecast that the tech industry will drop the equivalent of roughly 40 Seattles onto America’s grid within a decade; aggressive scenarios predict more than 60 in half that time.

> [...] by 2030, U.S. data centers will consume more electricity than all of the [USA]’s heavy industries [...] put together.

Basically it boils down to the US meeting this electricity need using natural gas and fossil fuels (with nuclear as an eventual goal) and China moving at a similar pace using renewables. Of course the AI companies on the west coast don't have to experience the pollution such energy demand brings to the communities nearby the power and data center facilities.