Back in the 1800s railroads sold stock for tracks they swore would connect coast to coast, and most never made it past the planning stage so towns died waiting for trains that never came and the country still has half-finished bridges rotting in the woods from that era.
Same thing is happening with data centers right now and nobody’s saying it out loud.
12 gigawatts of new capacity was promised for this year but only a third is actually under construction, the rest is just paperwork. The grid can’t take it because interconnection waits run five years now, and Texas alone has 226 gigawatts of pending requests on a grid that’s never handled more than 85.
Meanwhile Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are spending $650 billion on AI infrastructure this year while half that money is going to buildings that won’t open on time, and stock prices keep going up because nobody’s checking whether the buildings actually exist.
Wall Street keeps cheering announcements for buildings that don’t exist
byu/Vouchy-MOD inEntrepreneur
Posted by Vouchy-MOD
2 Comments
This is a classic supply chain lag. The grid is the ultimate gatekeeper, and even if they had the buildings, the wait for high-voltage transformers is measured in years right now. Tbh most investors just don’t understand the physical reality of electricity.
The gap between what gets announced and what actually gets powered on is probably a lot bigger than most people realize. Even the interconnection queue can turn a lot of these timelines into more of an investor story than an execution plan. Would be nice to see more reporting that follows projects from press release to actual power-on instead of treating every announcement like it already exists.