More from All the latest updates on AI data centers
Growing electricity demand for AI and the Trump administration’s love of natural gas have influenced the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook, Heatmap reports.
US power grids aren’t moving fast enough to keep up with the sudden rise in electricity demand from AI. Data center developers are forging ahead anyway, adding their own gas turbines and fuel cells.
[The Wall Street Journal]
That’s according to a recent Bloomberg analysis of wholesale electricity prices across the US, which has more data centers than any other country.
There are other factors aside from speculative electricity demand from data centers that are pushing up prices. Updating aging grids with new power lines and recovering from climate disasters is also costly.
OpenAI said in a blog post that it would “put Stargate ahead of schedule to secure full $500 billion, 10-gigawatt commitment by end of 2025.” The news comes one day after the company announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia, which will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as it builds and deploys “at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters with NVIDIA systems.”
The ecommerce giant will spend $16 billion building the two campuses in Jackson, MS — $6 billion more than what it originally planned to invest, according to state documents seen by Bloomberg. The biggest portion of its spending will go toward servers, fiber-optic cable, and other technology equipment, Bloomberg reports.
Meta, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI are similarly pouring billions into setting up data centers across the US.
It’s reportedly part of “billions of dollars in private sector investment to build artificial intelligence infrastructure” that Donald Trump is preparing to announce, with the first project in Texas. Oddly, earlier rumors about “Stargate” included Microsoft and this one doesn’t so far, but their connection with OpenAI has grown more complicated since then.
Executives from the companies are expected to say they plan to commit $100 billion initially and pour up to $500 billion into Stargate over the next four years.
The state’s utility board approved an 8 percent rate hike to increase energy production for data centers, while Navajo Nation residents live without electricity, writes The Washington Post:
But it rejected a plan to bring electricity to parts of the Navajo Nation land ... because of “concerns about how the funds would be used,” adding that customers are not “responsible for extending electricity to all tribal areas of the state.”
[The Washington Post]
As AI companies vie for more processing power, Meta announced its largest data center yet in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Construction will start in December and will continue through 2030.
Elon Musk’s xAI has a rapidly growing supercomputer that other AI companies are worried about, The Information reports. Hopefully, they also find out how the facility affects the local environment.
[The Information]
Utility planning documents show rising costs for customers in some regions of the US as tech companies build out energy-hungry data centers, the Washington Post reports:
“A lot of governors and local political leaders who wanted economic growth and vitality from these data centers are now realizing it can come at a cost of increased consumer bills,” said Neil Chatterjee, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
[The Washington Post]