No matter how much cash you throw you can't just materialize a 100 nuclear reactors to power the data centers.
Looking at Nvidia revenues in the past few years, there's maybe $300 billion worth of GPUs currently deployed in the U.S. The B200 costs ~$40k, so we have 7.5 million B200-equivalents, which draw 1000W. Running these at full capacity requires 66 TWh a year, or ~1.5% of total current U.S. electricity consumption. Maybe a bit more to account for inefficiencies, cooling, and other components, but not more than ~2.5% total I would guess.
So it's not that much in reality, but will definitely grow fast.
Hyperscaler PUE (which includes cooling, power conversion, etc) is typically 1.10-1.15, so multiply 1.5% by 1.1.
The person you replied to already mentioned cooling and multiplied by 1.67 to cover ancillary uses.
I think your numbers are off.
For a start you are effectively calculating a GPU only number.
I think 100Twh would be the minimum level to think about "all-in". And even that is probably being generous.
Remember, afterall that Google have just bought half the capacity (4.1Twh) of a nuclear power plant in Finland, on top of 630 MW of wind and 94MW of battery.
This is to cater for three new sites at Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala and expansion at Hamina. So basically 3.5 datacentres.
But Finland is quite a small place. The US has more sites and bigger sites, so the numbers probably grow exponentially very quickly.
Aluminium is often described as "congealed electricity". Ship bauxite to wherever power is cheap and stranded, turn it into metal, and ship the metal out. Here in NZ, Tiwai Point is the textbook case, with London-based Rio Tinto running a smelter on the other side of the world that exists mainly because Manapōuri hydro had nowhere else to go.
AI data centres can be just the same - even more so, since the plant's assets (its chips) are virtually perishables, so there is less concern about assets becoming stranded if the host goes rogue. All the US needs is friendly and stable allied countries with cheap power.
Datacenters enable anyone with a computer to use it.
Also, unlike China, US companies are building data centers all over the world, which gives them higher distribution and ability to colocate with the energy production sources.
Lastly, energy production costs have been decreasing over the last couple of decades. If they will increase, the market will react, as it always does. Looking backwards does not predict the future in this case.
There is a strong chance most of the researchers are pulled out of the US and Europe if WWIII really kicks off or even if there is just more global crisis and concern.
One other thing about the power needs. Within a few years, the power efficiency of AI chips is likely to improve by a factor of 20, 50 or more times by switching to true compute-in-memory architecture with new materials that have made rapid progress lately.
for wwiii it would likely imply a war in asia too, so it's not as if PRC will be a safe place for those researches to run away to.
So it is very unlikely that a neighbor will have the audacity to attack them, and even if this happens, i'd expect the war to be over rapidly. Just like if Canada or Mexico tried to attack the US.
It's almost as if collaboration is the foundation of scientific progress. Too bad US has lost the notes.
Plus another bottleneck - China produces engineers, the US produces lawyers.
> For the US, ASEE and NCES put engineering bachelor's degrees at a stable 130,000–145,000 a year, rising above 200,000 if computer science is included. Because China counts CS as engineering, the fair comparison is roughly 1.35M against 230–250k US engineering plus CS graduates. That is about 5–6x in absolute terms. Adjusted for population (1.41B vs 335M), China produces about 950 per million people and the US about 700 (1.3–1.4x more).
Even Claude highlights that the numbers aren't apples to apples and in China the definition of "engineer" is more loose. I do believe that in relative numbers, more engineers graduate in China
On lawyers:
> In the US there were 1,322,649 active lawyers as of January 2024. For China, there were around 650,000 lawyers in 2022. Which in relative terms is 8x in the US than China.
Lets see how these numbers stack up
Annual PHDS
CS: US = 2300 China = 5500 ECE: US = 2400 China = 7500 Math: US = 2200 China = 4500
Now of the US PHDS what percentage of the PHD's are awarded to students from China?
CS: 32% ECE: 35% Math: 26%
There's a very american winners and losers, black and white, narrative spreading in every single field from decades.
We Europeans used to be more nuanced, but are slowly falling for it too.
For processes that are scalable, well known and industrial, profit motive actually does provide results.
The question is more of are there bottlenecks of skill and maybe secret sauce (eg something like ASML).
> "Quite frankly, the biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it's power and it's sort of the ability to get the builds done fast enough close to power," he told the show's hosts. "So if you can't do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can't plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It's not a supply issue of chips. It's actually the fact that I don't have warm shells to plug into."
> - Satya Nadella
https://redmondmag.com/blogs/generationai/2025/12/microsoft-...
So that’s how the Matrix got started …
https://www.wabe.org/utilities-in-georgia-southeast-may-be-o...
https://cleanenergy.org/news/psc-approves-georgia-powers-dan...
https://www.smarterdigitalvirginia.com/post/the-big-bottlene...
just to name a few, there's a lot more I list out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700743
As these models get smarter they will no longer distribute it openly. Patel reporting this too.
There are real headwinds that I don’t think people have thought through.
Yeah, right.
Like Terry Tao recently said, there are nonlinear effects at play. Things are going to get chaotic and I do not have confidence (like the parent comment) of anyone "winning".
I agree in principle, but it could be more than 5 years, maybe 10. Who knows what things will look like then.