Tom Dotan and Asa Fitch of The Wall Street Journal tell their readers why the AI industry’s thirst for new data centers can’t be satisfied. They write:
The frenzy to build data centers to serve the exploding demand for artificial intelligence is causing a shortage of the parts, property and power that the sprawling warehouses of supercomputers require.
The lead time to get custom cooling systems is five times longer than a few years ago, data center executives say. Delivery times for backup generators have gone from as little as a month to as long as two years. […]
“The data-center market needs power yesterday,” said Clayton Scott, NuScale’s chief commercial officer.
Armada, a San Francisco startup, builds data centers inside of shipping containers. The company can drop these portable facilities, full of Nvidia chip-powered servers, in locations such as remote areas of Texas or Africa that are near inexpensive sources of power like gas wells.
El Salvador—after trying to build a better business environment with a crackdown on gangs—has slashed taxes on AI. Marc Seal, who runs a company that invests in AI data centers, is considering tapping the country’s volcanoes to power such data centers using green, geothermal power.
Read more here.
