Texas slams on the brakes for 1,800 data centers

tomshardware.com

1 point·ksec··3 comments

I wish somebody working in the field could perhaps help me, why are there even 1800 DC to be built? And this is just for Texas.

Is this 1800 buildings? Or 1800 sites? How can there be so many DC being built concurrently? Why are they not 180 or at best 18? Where are all these new appetite coming from? It can't be all AI because if only a few players are training and centralised we would have a few big AI DC only. Instead these are like the edge.

I can't quite wrap my head around these number. So do we have 18,000+ DC in US currently being built? No wonder why people are against DC building.

Quite often these stories come down to a "first come, first served" system where you just need to add your name to the list.

Doesn't matter if you don't have money, don't have land, don't have customers, don't have experience in the field.

Getting your name on the list is seen as valuable and transferrable like squatting a domain name.

But sometimes people like the big number, even if it's obviously BS. Makes for a good headline (works both positively and negatively depending on framing) and as leverage for other political motives. It's happened repeatedly for renewbles projects seeking grid connections.

Generally as soon as any common sense limits are applied the vast majority evaporates.

My skepticism of Texas authorities and their quotes in the article makes me think they are taking advantage of this to say "see how many datacentres we protected you from" when actually most never really existed in any true sense. Their buddy's data center will still get built.

Thank you. May be that makes more sense from a political POV.

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