AI loads break generators with EKG-style power swings
“If you actually start to look at the load profile of an AI data center, it's one of the most volatile loads you've ever seen. 12, 14 times a minute load swings that are 30, 80 percent the size of the data center. And that's wreaked havoc on these data centers moving quickly because it's tearing up gen sets. They're literally breaking the crankshaft of the gen sets. They're burning through batteries. And it's a lot of these data centers that are all about time to power and moving quickly. And they got ahead of the tips of their skis because they didn't architect the infrastructure correctly for it to succeed.”
Smaller distributed AI boxes are replacing gigawatt mega-campuses
“If you look at the Stargate 1 project, by the time they completed building the first few buildings, they were already like four GPU generations behind, right? And so the difficulty with building these massive structures and building a whole city around it is one, the staffing you need in a specific location, and two, the capital, and then three, the lead time to everything. When you do modularize like AI in a box that you can just drop the container off and when that container becomes out of date, you pick it up, take it back to the factory and drop another one off, I think you're going to see the AI factory change.”
Utilities blame data centers for 40% bigger spending budgets
“Every electric utility that's an investor-owned utility is publicly traded. When you listen to the conference calls of all of those CEOs the last three months, they are firmly blaming data centers for rate increases. They have added like 40% to their budgets since 2024, right? That means that they said before we're raising rates 5%, now they're raising rates 9%, right? They separately had a report last year that said they were going to spend a trillion dollars between 2025 and 2029 investing in the grid. This year, they just re-upped that from a trillion to 1.4 trillion from 2026 to 2030.”
Flexible data centers could cut everyone's electric bill 10%
“When you look at our grid, if the data centers were willing to be flexible with their load for 100 hours, you could accommodate 100 gigawatts of data center load growth in our grid easily and reduce everyone's electricity bills by 10%. But that would require coordination between the data center and the utility and the governors and folks would have to like each other. But instead, they're saying, screw you, we'd like to be run off grid, right? Okay, that feels very selfish.”
Data center promises wildly exceed actual GPU supply
“They can't build more than 50 gigawatts of data centers between now and 2030 because of limitations on GPUs, memory and CPUs, right? But if you go to communities, they're creating havoc at the level of 500 gigawatts across the country. So they are making empty promises to people across the country to disrupt their communities when they don't have the GPUs to fill it, right? In the state of Texas, they are suggesting an official ERCOT letterhead, which is the transmission operator in Texas, that the load queue could be 300 gigawatts, right? Now, mind you, Texas is 70 gigawatts. That's a BS number, right?”
Straits of Hormuz closure threatens Northeast home heating fuel
“When President Trump trumpets how many tankers are heading towards Texas to pick up product, they are picking up product to take it to other continents. So they are picking up jet fuel, they are picking up diesel, they are picking up gasoline. Because we got a lot of it. Now, if we start shipping it all to other places, our prices are going to go up. Diesel is up to $6, $7 a gallon, gasoline is above $4 a gallon. So when you think about 4.5 million households in the Northeast are still using fuel oil to heat their homes. That fuel oil comes from the Straits of Hormuz. And so now they don't have fuel oil, right?”
Land values jump 30x when rural plots get grid interconnects
“Lots of people that have rural lands and there's also a big power line that comes through their land go, I can build a data center here. And they might have been able to get $5,000 or $10,000 an acre, but if they can get a large load interconnect, they can get $100, $200, $300,000 an acre for the same land. So you see a lot of people that came in and said, okay, if I can find the sweet spot of land where I can get gas and water and power and all these things, all of a sudden the value of that land goes through the roof and the data centers are willing to pay for it.”
“Texas has passed SB6, as Jon suggested, which basically says that if there is ever a shortage of power in the state of Texas, data centers go offline first. So that should be the law of the land. That's called an interruptible tariff. It's been around for 50 years. It is not new and all data centers should be required to sign one. There are companies like Gridcare and Google Tapestry and Camu Energy and others who can use that data to tell you exactly where there's space on the grid today. There's 100,000 megawatts by the way of space on the grid.”
