America's Data Center Build-Out Is Falling Way Behind Schedule | Hacker News Reader

America's Data Center Build-Out Is Falling Way Behind Schedule

wsj.com

30 points1vuio0pswjnm719 comments

People aren't stupid. They have very valid concerns about what AI will mean for their jobs over the next 5-10 years. Since AI companies (and companies in general) refuse to offer any real solution to being permanently unable to use your skills to create value that enables your survival, people are shoving back.

Why would those 2 things be connected at all?

"Falling behind schedule" doesn't really seem like the right term, for a sector of the economy that has been accelerating for the past few years.

You could easily describe this trend positively rather than negatively, like:

"Google has built an incredible amount of datacenters in the past few years, which makes sense since Google Cloud revenue has tripled since 2021. But they are trying to grow even faster and add more revenue."

Disagree. The idea of rapid data center buildout, to the tune of gigawatts, is a major factor in the valuation of a bunch of companies. Overpromising and underdelivering, when such huge stock valuations are built on those promises, is a genuine problem. The hyperscalars can be building, but if they're building slower than their investors expect, it's still a real problem which can be fairly described as "falling behind schedule"

I think delaying the build-out of data centers is a good thing. If you've got a scarce resource, you either need to find a way of getting more of that resource or change how you use that resource to meet your end goal. The scarcity of data centers, compute, or storage should create the pressure to drive increased engineering to reduce demand for those resources.

We have seen some changes that improve LLM efficiency, but not enough yet. We need to put more pressure on the AI industry to reduce its resource use through engineering.

There are few large scale US projects that don’t fall behind schedule so that’s not notable. It is notable that the demand-responsive pricing is so useful you can get 100 MW out of it by paying people for power in critical periods. And it is notable that a wind and solar company is Google’s other way out of this. How interesting.

Sooner or later the need for energy will become crucial. If it comes to war, then the US can build but if it comes to anything short of that, environmental concerns will dominate and probably make things unlikely.

It’s no wonder they want to put datacenters in space, calculating that it’s easier to solve the problems there than to solve the problems here. Though I’m surprised: are there no allied nations where we could put these things? The Trump admin has only been here since 2025 but opposition to these projects has existed locally for years. But universally? I imagine Japan or Korea, countries with less superstition around nuclear reactors, would have been happy to have done this.

They are against them in Japan too:

https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/16198621

> I imagine Japan or Korea, countries with less superstition around nuclear reactors--

Public opinion on nuclear power in Japan is not great, particularly after Fukushima. They just don't have a lot of other good options - as it is, the country relies heavily on imported coal and gas.

If these data centers are going to be so profitable, then it should be simple to make guarantees about clean self-power, closed loop cooling, and noise and light pollution mitigation. There definitely shouldn't be deals to avoid taxes while lying about job creation.

Maybe if they did those things, there would be fewer permitting fights.

> There definitely shouldn't be deals to avoid taxes while lying about job creation.

The people making those deals are physiologically incapable of not attempting to benefit from socialized externalities to make obscene levels of private profit.

You might as well be asking them to voluntarily stop breathing or pay a fair amount of taxes, they just can't do it.

The problem is it only takes one stupid municipality for them to get a ridiculous deal and, unfortunately, there are a lot of cities that don't have great representation. These companies probably only have to ask 10 different places for an obviously disastrous deal before one of this says yes. It doesn't take corruption, just odds.

This is pretty much exactly my gripes, too. Data centers are necessary, but why are we doing this all the wrong way?

The new Utah data center is building new gas pipelines to generate 9GW instead of requiring ANY percentage of green energy, while also giving massive tax breaks that the families living nearby and statewide will have to cover.

For actionable information on this specific project, see:

https://www.breatheutah.org/news/the-stratos-project-questio...

I keep seeing people all over the internet adding the caveat that the data centres are necessary in comments following stories about rollout (and often the stories themselves). But never why that's the case. So the question is why are more data centres necessary at the proposed rollout rates? What actually drives this demand?

Don't worry, upstate New York's got your back.

We see your gas pipelines and raise you 100 to 316 diesel generators in a generator farm, with "only 20 running at a time". Shitty Bitcoin mining company that didn't give us any jobs suddenly pivoting to AI.

https://northcountrynow.com/stories/massena-town-board-takin...

Hot take: this is actual a symptom of power demand being too low, not too high. Bitcoin mining didn't draw enough energy to drive a real structural transition, so minors made up the gap with diesel. If NY had Virgina or Texas levels of datacenters, they could provide enough spend and power offtake to justify investments in nuclear.

Can you deploy a nuclear plant in 6 months, which is the time scale these facilities are looking for? You can do that with solar or diesel or natgas.

>clean self-power

Just clean and scale the grid.

>closed loop cooling

Just clean and scale your water supply. Remove all the lead that's clearly in there while you are at it.

>noise and light pollution mitigation

NextDC B2 has its phase 2 under construction right now, after the construction workers have all gone home theres no external noise from Phase 1. You can stand outside Equinix SY1 2 or 3 and you cant hear anything but road noise. Its a solved engineering problem. Any deviance from this can be interrogated locally. Its not a pertinent issue with Datacenters as a class.

I agree with this in part. Funneling some of these massive investments into clean power, reduced water use, and noise mitigation, should certainly be a big policy priority, but I think actually achieving those things requires a lot of other policy flexibility. For example, if we want data center builders to use clean power, we also need to clear the way for them to actually build nuclear power plants. I suspect the water problem will solve it self as closed loop cooling systems come down in cost (and besides, 80% of data centers' net water use happens at the power generation stage).

Also, I am a big fan of data centers profit-sharing directly with communities.

Nuclear plants will not be built in the timescales these plants demand. No data centre is going to wait 5-10 years for a nuclear plant to be built in the USA, and the modular passively safe designs aren't ready.

I also seriously doubt the ability of the Trump admin to co-ordinate the required reforms and investments in nuclear energy.

Renewables, batteries and gas are probably going to be the only viable option.

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