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Comment by gehsty | Hacker News Reader

Some more context, Nuclear power stations can be up to 2GW, offshore windfarms are seemingly hitting a plateau at ~1.5GW, individual turbines in operations now are 15MW. Grids are already strained, 525kV DC systems can transmit ~2GW of power per cable bundle…

Adding 10GW of offtake to any grid is going to cause significant problems and likely require CAPEX intensive upgrades (try buy 525kV dc cable from an established player and you are waiting until 2030+), as well as new generation for the power!

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But that's assuming they actually have to transport power over long distances right? If they colocate these massive AI datacenters right next to the power generation plants, it should be cheap to transport the power. You don't need to upgrade massive sections of the grid and build long-distance power lines.

The xAI Colossus 2 1GW data centers seem to be located about ~20 miles from the power generation utility (https://semianalysis.com/2025/09/16/xais-colossus-2-first-gi...)

20 miles is a long way to move power, on land you have huge issues over getting permits for construction as it’s so disruptive, offshore specialist vessels that serve a global existing supply chain.

Yeah the path forward here is going to be Apple-like vertical supply chain integration. There is absolutely no spare capacity in the infra side of electrical right now, at least in the US.

And there is great cost saving potential in vertical integration. Distribution and transmission are huge costs. If you can build a data center right next to a power plant and just take all their power you get much better prices. Not trivial to do with the kinds of bursty loads that seem typical of AI data centers, but if you can engineer your way to a steady load (or at least steady enough that traditional grid smoothing techniques work) you can get a substantial advantage

> bursty loads that seem typical of AI data centers

Don’t datacenters want to run at their rated capacity 24/7?

I don’t think that’s possible with large scale power infrastructure, and specifically grid infrastructure is so tightly regulated. Closest that I’m aware of was TSMC buying the output of an entire offshore windfarm for 25yrs (largest power purchase contract ever - TSMC / Ørsted)… maybe Microsoft re starting nuclear power plants, or Google reporting offshore wind sites come out of contract (but nothing at the 10GW scale).

In the long run, perhaps this will give us a better power grid, just like the dotcom bubble gave rise to broadband?

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