There are niche expensive datacenters with higher power density, but as it stands, exotic multi-kW hardware at scale makes sense if you either save a ton on per-node licensing, or you need extreme bandwidth and/or low latency.
I think that was the case in 2020;
>By 2020, that was up to 8–10 kW per rack. Note, though, that two-thirds of U.S. data centers surveyed said that they were already experiencing peak demands in the 16–20 kW per rack range. The latest numbers from 2022 show 10% of data centers reporting rack densities of 20–29 kW per rack, 7% at 30–39 kW per rack, 3% at 40–49 kW per rack and 5% at 50 kW or greater.
We dont have 2023 numbers and we are coming to 2024. But it is clear that demands for high power density is growing. ( And hopefully at a much faster pace )
There’s always some limiting factor, and there’s always some (possibly crazy expensive) way to resolve it and get a bit more power until you run into the next limiting factor.
Datacenter: seems to cap out at around 850 MW [2]
Same ballpark I guess? Probably both are limited by inexpensive power availability + other connectivity factors (road/rail, fiber).
[1]: “Therefore, a 300-tonne, 300 MVA EAF will require approximately 132 MWh of energy to melt the steel, and a "power-on time" (the time that steel is being melted with an arc) of approximately 37 minutes.” via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_arc_furnace
[2]: https://www.racksolutions.com/news/blog/how-many-servers-doe...
How many backup generators does that need??