Speaker 1: This is Tom Rowlands Reese and you're listening to Switched
Speaker 1: on the podcast brought to you by BNF. The rapid
Speaker 1: rise of energy intensive AI data centers is reshaping the
Speaker 1: near term outlook for US power markets. Outpacing the energy
Speaker 1: demand growth of EVS, hydrogen and all other demand classes
Speaker 1: out to twenty thirty, data centers will account for eight
Speaker 1: point six percent of US electricity demand by twenty thirty five.
Speaker 1: That's almost twice as much as today. Largely owned and
Speaker 1: operated by a few highly consolidated companies with very deep pockets,
Speaker 1: this concentration of capital allows for rapid expansion and a
Speaker 1: significant influence over future energy infrastructure investment. So what strategies
Speaker 1: are these companies employing to optimize their data center rollout?
Speaker 1: On today's show, I'm joined by BNF's head of US
Speaker 1: Power Helen Co and US Power Senior Associate Natalie Lemandebrata,
Speaker 1: and together we discuss findings from their note US data
Speaker 1: center market outlook the Age of AI, which B and
Speaker 1: EF clients can find at BNF go on the Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Terminal or on BNF dot com. All right, let's get
Speaker 1: to talking about the outlook AI data centers with Helen
Speaker 1: and Natalie. Helen, thank you for being here. Thanks Tom
Speaker 1: and Natalie thanks for being here as well.
Speaker 2: Thank you Tom.
Speaker 1: So Natalie reports up to Helen, and Helen reports up
Speaker 1: to me, and I'm not saying that to flex. I'm
Speaker 1: saying it for a couple of reasons. One is, I'm
Speaker 1: like super proud to have such smart people on my team,
Speaker 1: and I'm also particularly proud of the work they've done
Speaker 1: around data centers. But also this situation of this reporting
Speaker 1: line means that I get to have catch ups with
Speaker 1: them regularly, which has been pretty useful to me personally
Speaker 1: because this question around AI and data centers has had
Speaker 1: a lot of people talking, a lot of people have opinions,
Speaker 1: and so I have often found myself in situations where
Speaker 1: people are expressing their opinions, and in those situations, I've
Speaker 1: developed this tactic to different myself from the pack, which
Speaker 1: is that in the situation, I just regurgitate whatever Helen
Speaker 1: and Natalie last told me about data centers, and everyone
Speaker 1: thinks that I'm really smart. So first off, let's start
Speaker 1: just with the headline numbers. How much data center build
Speaker 1: are we expecting in the US According to the report
Speaker 1: that we just published, so.
Speaker 2: BNF's latest outlook has data center and demand more than
Speaker 2: doubling from thirty five gigatts today to close to eighty
Speaker 2: gigawatts in twenty thirty five. This would account for close
Speaker 2: to nine percent of total US electricity demand.
Speaker 1: Wow, so we're expecting let me just do the mass
Speaker 1: suddenly like forty five gigawatts ish, which for those of
Speaker 1: you who are you know, maybe new to the energy space,
Speaker 1: that's like twenty to thirty nuclear plants, and nuclear plants
Speaker 1: are really really big and take a long time to build.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of demand. So we are forecasting some
Speaker 1: astronomical amount of data center build. How do we compare
Speaker 1: to everyone else that has an opinion on this topic?
Speaker 3: We're relatively conservative and relatively conservative. Yes, yeah, our overall
Speaker 3: demand build is fairly low in terms of uptake relative
Speaker 3: to our third parties.
Speaker 1: Okay, so how come they are forecasting something so much
Speaker 1: more aggressive than us, or how come we are so
Speaker 1: much more conservative than them?
Speaker 3: Well, we don't really know what our third party counterparts
Speaker 3: do in terms of their forecast, but what we do
Speaker 3: know is like how we forecast data centers, and our
Speaker 3: focus was really to look at like how data centers
Speaker 3: move from one stage to the next. So in our
Speaker 3: project data base, what we know is that we can
Speaker 3: see data center stages. So we have like early stage,
Speaker 3: which is basically anything kind of just just got announced.
Speaker 3: We have projects that are committed, which is anything that
Speaker 3: has some type of like land or permitting agreement, things
Speaker 3: that are under construction and then live. And what we
Speaker 3: did was we tracked how these data centers moved from
Speaker 3: one stage to the next, and we looked at like
Speaker 3: the probability of how these data centers moved.
Speaker 1: From and stay to the next. So typically, how long
Speaker 1: does it take for a data center, you know, from
Speaker 1: early on in this pipeline to being commissioned, how long
Speaker 1: would that take?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what we've found based on data between twenty
Speaker 3: twenty to twenty twenty four is that it takes seven
Speaker 3: years to build a data center, which is a really,
Speaker 3: really long time.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that's really interesting. So in a way, our
Speaker 1: forecast we're saying with a fair amount of confidence because
Speaker 1: you know, twenty thirty five is only just over a
Speaker 1: decade away, and we have data on everything that's getting built,
Speaker 1: and we know that it takes most of that decade
Speaker 1: for it to get built. So anyone who's forecasting something
Speaker 1: more aggressive than us either has a different view on
Speaker 1: how long it takes to build data centers, or they
Speaker 1: must have different data, or maybe they're using a completely
Speaker 1: different methodology. But it's good to know that we're the
Speaker 1: ones doing it right. So who's building all of these
Speaker 1: data centers this sort of colossal volume of new demand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the data center market is pretty concentrated. There's
Speaker 2: two main types of owners. There's colo data centers who
Speaker 2: have buildings with multiple tenants, and you have these self
Speaker 2: build companies, which are typically your large tech companies or
Speaker 2: hyperscalers is what they're usually referred to. And the hyperscalers
Speaker 2: of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are close to fifty
Speaker 2: percent of total operating capacity today and this is only
Speaker 2: set to grow. They're building much larger campuses close to
Speaker 2: gigawatts scale. Amazon has multiple gigawat data center campuses in
Speaker 2: development in Virginia. Meta has another two gigawatts in Louisiana,
Speaker 2: and just as a point of reference, in the last decade,
Speaker 2: data centers have typically been in the tens of megawatts.
Speaker 2: So really, as we're pushing through these hundreds of megawatts
Speaker 2: and gigawat size, the rise of uptake will be much
Speaker 2: faster and larger.
Speaker 1: Okay, And so just just to make sure I've understood
Speaker 1: overall correctly, those four companies are fifty percent of the
Speaker 1: data center build today, but we think that there's going
Speaker 1: to be even more because they're the companies that are
Speaker 1: building these really big data centers that are so much
Speaker 1: of what we're expecting. So you've already alluded to these
Speaker 1: data centers are maybe bigger than the ones we've seen
Speaker 1: in the past, that's the trend. But in what other
Speaker 1: ways are the data centers that we're expecting different to
Speaker 1: the ones that we've seen in the past.
Speaker 3: Yeah, before we jump into that, I think it's important
Speaker 3: to understand how be any of categorized as data centers.
Speaker 3: So we categorize data centers in three different ways. Vers size,
Speaker 3: which Natalie had alluded to, first retail, wholesale and hyperscaler
Speaker 3: So that's just based on the project size of a
Speaker 3: data center. And then there's operator type, which is the
Speaker 3: ownership so either self build or co location, which Natalie
Speaker 3: had already explained. And then there's workload, So workload is
Speaker 3: based on just the computing process of a data center,
Speaker 3: and there are many different types of workload from cloud
Speaker 3: or enterprise, telecom, crypto mining, and that determines a lot
Speaker 3: about the data center's overall infrastructure and then also their
Speaker 3: overall load and power consumption.
Speaker 1: So then, I mean one of the other things that
Speaker 1: you've spoken to me about is when we're talking about
Speaker 1: AI data centers, that there's two main flavors, So can
Speaker 1: you just talk me through those as well.
Speaker 2: Within AI, we mainly branch it out in two main workloads,
Speaker 2: AI training and AI inference. AI training is processing a
Speaker 2: large amount of data in order to train these large
Speaker 2: language models, and AI inference is taking those already train
Speaker 2: models for real time applications in use, like when you're
Speaker 2: careering in chat GPT, And those two workloads have also
Speaker 2: different location and constraints of the data center itself. AI inference,
Speaker 2: since they're theoretically interacting with the end user in real time,
Speaker 2: they'll care more about latency and location parameters to that
Speaker 2: end user. AI training a lot of that processing happens
Speaker 2: on site, so theoretically they could be more flexible on
Speaker 2: where they locate, and they could follow where there's available
Speaker 2: power or other constraints.
Speaker 1: Okay, I mean you use the word theoretically there, which
Speaker 1: maybe is doing a lot of work. And we'll come
Speaker 1: back to where people are actually building data centers later on,
Speaker 1: because I do have a question about that. But roughly,
Speaker 1: what is do we have an idea of what proportion
Speaker 1: of the data center building the pipeline is for AI
Speaker 1: and what proportion of it is training and what proportion
Speaker 1: of it is inference.
Speaker 2: That's actually very tough to ascertain exactly what the split is.
Speaker 2: If we look at a large Gigawat campus, some of
Speaker 2: their buildings could be used for training today, but it
Speaker 2: could be used for inference in the future. Similarly, we
Speaker 2: talked about different owner types a co location building, they
Speaker 2: could have, you know, multiple tenants, and unless you know
Speaker 2: exactly who the tenant is and what type of workloads
Speaker 2: they're running, it's also difficult to know if it is
Speaker 2: for AI training at inference. But we can infer based
Speaker 2: on where they're getting built.
Speaker 1: But these distinctions, I mean, what I'm here here is
Speaker 1: that it's not just that nobody tells us which it
Speaker 1: is that makes it a little bit of a gray area.
Speaker 1: It's that actually even a data center itself might sometimes
Speaker 1: at one point in its life be doing one thing
Speaker 1: and at a different point in it's life be doing
Speaker 1: something else.
Speaker 3: I think for power folks, I often try to like
Speaker 3: frame it like a data center is very similar to
Speaker 3: a battery. Like batteries can do multiple different types of
Speaker 3: energy services or ancillary services, a data center can do
Speaker 3: multiple different types of workload. It can be doing AI
Speaker 3: training or cloud as long as the configuration is correct,
Speaker 3: or it could do those types of workload.
Speaker 1: Got it. So just because you've optimized one to one
Speaker 1: thing doesn't mean that it can't do the other thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And particularly in colocation data centers where basically these
Speaker 3: companies are renting out their RT servers to tenants, those
Speaker 3: tenants are probably doing different types of workload. There can
Speaker 3: be multiple applications in a data center.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a workload, which is often why you see in
Speaker 2: colocation that they're optimizing for everything because they don't know
Speaker 2: who their tenant is. I will add, though, in terms
Speaker 2: of AI data centers that they are quite different from
Speaker 2: data centers today. We already talked that these data centers
Speaker 2: are getting larger. A lot of that has to do
Speaker 2: with the GPUs in those servers being much more so.
Speaker 1: Can you just what a GPUs.
Speaker 2: Graphical processing units, which is they're similar to CPUs central
Speaker 2: processing units, but they're very specialized in they're cooler.
Speaker 1: I think that we've got to the level of understanding.
Speaker 1: I'm good with it. So it's like it's like a chip,
Speaker 1: but it's a different kind of chip.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very good at parallel processing, which is optimized
Speaker 2: for training large language models. I'm sure lots of people
Speaker 2: have heard of Navidia and their GPUs. A lot of
Speaker 2: tech companies are also building their AI accelerators, which are
Speaker 2: specialized chips for these models. So a lot of the
Speaker 2: design of the data center today in order to accommodate
Speaker 2: AI training workloads are different. A lot of that has
Speaker 2: to do with these GPUs and the rack that they're
Speaker 2: on are going to be much more power dense, which
Speaker 2: means they need a lot more sophisticated cooling technologies to
Speaker 2: accommodate those sort of rack densities that could be tenext
Speaker 2: to what typical data centers are today. We've seen, for example,
Speaker 2: Metas scrapping data centers that were not ail ready, so
Speaker 2: it's quite difficult to retrofit a data center from five
Speaker 2: years ago to an AI workload.
Speaker 1: So while a.
Speaker 2: Data center in the future could have multiple uses, it's
Speaker 2: also very specialized to what they're going to be running.
Speaker 1: Got it is it? Would it be right for me
Speaker 1: to say that, like, a data center designed for AI
Speaker 1: can be used for other things too, but a data
Speaker 1: center not designed for AI probably can't do AI? Is
Speaker 1: that a fair statement?
Speaker 3: I think that's a pretty fair statement. We're basically seeing
Speaker 3: new data centers being designed in a way that allows
Speaker 3: for AI training, and so there's an influence of like
Speaker 3: AI and data center design to be larger and more
Speaker 3: power tents.
Speaker 1: So in these training data centers that building these models.
Speaker 1: And one of the charts in the note that I
Speaker 1: really loved but haven't quite fully digested is one showing
Speaker 1: the amount of and you don't have to explain this
Speaker 1: unit amount of terror flops required too. Terrorflop that's just
Speaker 1: the unit of like computer work, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just a basic unit of computation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the amount of terror flops needed to design different
Speaker 1: AI models as they've become more and more in sophisticated
Speaker 1: and so obviously there's been an expectation that trend is
Speaker 1: going to continue, and everyone was you know, freaking out
Speaker 1: in both good ways and bad ways about all the
Speaker 1: power demand that this will intel. And then I remember
Speaker 1: deep seek came along and a lot of the people
Speaker 1: were like, oh, this changes everything. Can you just provide
Speaker 1: a bit of clarity on all of this.
Speaker 3: There was a couple of things I really tried to
Speaker 3: understand about all of this, just in terms of like
Speaker 3: power market fundamentals. I think when it comes to like
Speaker 3: forecasting for power demand, all things come down to some
Speaker 3: very basic constructs. It's usually like how much quantity of
Speaker 3: something and then the energy intensity of that something. And
Speaker 3: for data centers it's a very similar process. And when
Speaker 3: we think about like the energy efficiency of large language
Speaker 3: model AI training data centers, there's like a couple things
Speaker 3: to think through. First is around the energy intensity of
Speaker 3: power consumption from a chips perspective, and chip innovation is
Speaker 3: often like confused with like increasing energy efficiency. That's not
Speaker 3: necessarily the case. Typically when we think about chip innovation,
Speaker 3: it's often optimized for like operations per second, which means
Speaker 3: that like typically more like every generation of chips tend
Speaker 3: to have draw more power and therefore, like it increases
Speaker 3: the energy intensity of a data center. So there are
Speaker 3: new chips that are getting invented, like the Nvidia Blackwell
Speaker 3: that focuses on energy efficiency. But in general what we've
Speaker 3: seen is like the more advanced chips tend to draw
Speaker 3: on more power. The other thing that is really important
Speaker 3: for AI training is then like the number of parameters
Speaker 3: that an AI training model focuses on. So parameters is
Speaker 3: just like points of active information for a model to
Speaker 3: think through.
Speaker 1: So it's just the number of different things it thinks
Speaker 1: about sort of like so if I was thinking, like
Speaker 1: should I go to work today or should I walk
Speaker 1: to work today? Like, if I had one parameter, it
Speaker 1: might be what's the weather like outside? And if the
Speaker 1: two parameter might be what's the weather like outside and
Speaker 1: what day of the week is it? Yeah, you might
Speaker 1: determine whether or not I go to work. So that's
Speaker 1: like what each of those is a parameter.
Speaker 3: Exactly, exactly precisely and in general, like in the large
Speaker 3: language model community historically, or at least in the power
Speaker 3: industry historically, what people had thought through was that like
Speaker 3: more sophisticated models required more parameters. So with every generation
Speaker 3: of like chatchipt or Gemina or cloud. If you look
Speaker 3: at their like technical reports, what you'll see is that
Speaker 3: there's increasing amount of parameters that is used to like
Speaker 3: train these large language models, and so in general, like
Speaker 3: there was this overall consensus that the energy intensity of
Speaker 3: air training is an upward trend. You use more powerful chips,
Speaker 3: and you're using your training on more and more parameters,
Speaker 3: and so that's all driving more and more electricity consumption.
Speaker 3: Deep Seek came out in December twenty twenty four, and
Speaker 3: in their technical report, what was really cool was that
Speaker 3: they had a different training process. So it uses something
Speaker 3: called a mixture of experts training process, where instead of
Speaker 3: just like plugging in all of their parameters all at once,
Speaker 3: what they did was they pre categorized their parameters into experts.
Speaker 3: So like certain parameters that specialize in math or like colors,
Speaker 3: they would like pre categze them so that when you
Speaker 3: put in a query of a question to ask the
Speaker 3: model to train, it would know which specialization to pull
Speaker 3: the parameters from, which then drew on less power. So
Speaker 3: the other thing that the technical report published was that
Speaker 3: deep Seek performed at a very high level with chat
Speaker 3: GPT or like other types of large language models that
Speaker 3: used a lot more parameters, and so it kind of
Speaker 3: broke the assumption that you needed a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: parameters to make really sophisticated large language models.
Speaker 1: And so do you think that that will massively change
Speaker 1: the outlook for power demand from AI?
Speaker 3: So to answer your question from like a data center
Speaker 3: demand perspective, not necessarily in our near term forecast on
Speaker 3: in our data center outlook, we use like a project
Speaker 3: by project level forecasts, right. But in our new energy outlook,
Speaker 3: which focused more on like long term forecasts for data
Speaker 3: center demand, it focused on that fundamentals based way of forecasting,
Speaker 3: which it looks at long term in any given like market,
Speaker 3: what data generation and data usage looks like relative to
Speaker 3: the energy intensity of that data generation.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And there's a point you make in the report I
Speaker 1: recall and I don't think you were talking about deep
Speaker 1: seek here. I think you were talking about data center efficiency.
Speaker 1: But bring up Jevins paradox, which is this idea that
Speaker 1: if you make something more efficient, it doesn't mean necessarily
Speaker 1: that we save energy, it's that we just do more
Speaker 1: with what we were going to consume anyway, And could
Speaker 1: the same logic be applied for deep seek is if
Speaker 1: it is more efficient with parameters and therefore energy and
Speaker 1: also computer usage, then that just opens the door to
Speaker 1: do cooler things with AI than would have previously been possible,
Speaker 1: rather than to save energy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the energy intensity curve of AI training data centers
Speaker 3: like instead of it being like an upward swing, it
Speaker 3: goes down. But we also then know it opens up
Speaker 3: a lot more opportunities for a lot of different types
Speaker 3: of business to maybe do AI training right, which means
Speaker 3: that you have more companies that may be doing this.
Speaker 3: So got it runs paradox.
Speaker 1: Very interesting and actually I think that brings some real
Speaker 1: clarity into what this whole deep seat thing means for
Speaker 1: power demand, which my main takeaway is like not that much. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to say, but we shouldn't be saying, oh,
Speaker 1: this means all this data center demand growth isn't going
Speaker 1: to happen. Yes, So pulling out again, there's all of
Speaker 1: this data center build that's going to happen in the US,
Speaker 1: four companies are going to be behind a little bit
Speaker 1: more than half of it. Where are they going to
Speaker 1: be building all of this? And why are they going
Speaker 1: to be building in those places?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I'll also add on those four companies that are
Speaker 2: most of the data center market, they're also the companies
Speaker 2: that you know aren't building these AI training models and
Speaker 2: have the capacity to train large scale models because it's
Speaker 2: a very costly exercise that is only set to grow.
Speaker 2: They're also forty of the data center market, but they're
Speaker 2: also the ones training AI models because actually, not many
Speaker 2: companies can train A models, right, right.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the new big demand is becoming
Speaker 1: from these four companies. So a lot of the demand
Speaker 1: that we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess today when we look at the data
Speaker 2: center fleet, they're mostly for cloud. But going forward, the
Speaker 2: companies that can actually train AI models is less than
Speaker 2: ten companies training like frontier models, and that those are
Speaker 2: going to be the big tech companies.
Speaker 1: And so then where is this happening and why in
Speaker 1: those locations.
Speaker 2: So in our forecast we see three main markets emerge
Speaker 2: through twenty thirty five. We break them down by power
Speaker 2: region for power forecasting purposes.
Speaker 1: And that's just because that's how we think. I don't
Speaker 1: see states, I see power region.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we see PGM or Coat and Southeast, and
Speaker 2: within PGM, which spans fourteen states, we see Virginia continuing
Speaker 2: being one of the biggest markets so than Virginia has
Speaker 2: been data center capital for the last decade. If Virginia
Speaker 2: was a country, it would follow the US and China
Speaker 2: as having the largest data center market.
Speaker 4: In the world.
Speaker 1: Wow. Can I say that again? Wow?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Northern Virginia has been kind of at the center
Speaker 2: of data center build out. A lot of this has
Speaker 2: to do with a bit of history. They had the
Speaker 2: first Internet exchange point in the nineties, which was kind
Speaker 2: of the beginning of small data center build out, and
Speaker 2: data centers typically continue to cluster an existing markets, so
Speaker 2: as data centers grow, they'll have supporting infrastructure like fiber optics,
Speaker 2: utility relationships, and workforce availability that allows more data centers
Speaker 2: to continue to grow. So over time, Northern Virginia just
Speaker 2: has gotten hotter and hotter, and we see in our
Speaker 2: project Pipeline a lot of that continuing to grow. We
Speaker 2: do know that a lot of this could be more
Speaker 2: AI inference rather than AI training, but still a lot
Speaker 2: of data center demand happening. There. Another state in PJM
Speaker 2: is Ohio, which is emerging as one of the main
Speaker 2: hubs in the Midwest. Google is building data centers in
Speaker 2: New Albany, which is just outside Columbus, one of the
Speaker 2: largest cities in Ohio, as well as other co location
Speaker 2: and hyperscular companies.
Speaker 1: You know, you've highlighted some a couple of major markets
Speaker 1: with PGM. I think I think I thought was really
Speaker 1: interesting and maybe slightly paradoxical in the report you wrote
Speaker 1: was there's this chart from that has a survey of
Speaker 1: data center developers saying what do you prioritize when you're
Speaker 1: thinking about where to build a data center? And I
Speaker 1: think we said that the top three survey results it
Speaker 1: wasn't our survey, it was a third parties. The top
Speaker 1: three survey results all related to energy. It was something
Speaker 1: like security of supply, how cheap the energy is, how
Speaker 1: green the energy is. I can't remember, don't quote me
Speaker 1: on them, but it was energy related. When you look
Speaker 1: at the data of where they're currently building and have been, well,
Speaker 1: it kind of completely contradicts that thesis. You know, PGM
Speaker 1: doesn't have the cheapest or cleanest electricity in the US.
Speaker 1: I mean you could say it has good security of supply,
Speaker 1: So what is behind this paradox?
Speaker 2: I think we a lot of the hype right now
Speaker 2: in data center built out is AI related, and we
Speaker 2: did talk about how AI training could be more flexible.
Speaker 2: And we do see a lot of our merging innovations
Speaker 2: of siting near stranded renewable assets and going against the
Speaker 2: grain of traditional sighting. But most as we said, most
Speaker 2: of them are continuing to build out an existing data
Speaker 2: center market. So market's pre AI one theory is basically,
Speaker 2: they're investing billions of dollars in a data center for
Speaker 2: the next decade or so. While in the near term
Speaker 2: they can plan for AI training. In the future, it
Speaker 2: could be AI inference, or they could you know, retrofit
Speaker 2: and sell it to a co location company altogether, and
Speaker 2: they need to plan for those latency and redidancy requirements today.
Speaker 2: So even though in the near term they could cite
Speaker 2: it in you know, West Texas where there's a lot
Speaker 2: of renewables, we still see like Dallas Fort Worth and
Speaker 2: like northern Virginia as being hotspots, although we are seeing
Speaker 2: a trend of going a bit outside of urban locations
Speaker 2: and going more to where there is power supply.
Speaker 1: Got it. I remember earlier in the podcast you said
Speaker 1: in theory about you know where you could build training
Speaker 1: data cents and this is the this is what you're
Speaker 1: saying is in practice, it's like this, but we are
Speaker 1: seeing a bit of a trend, but just maybe not
Speaker 1: as much as you would think to the sort of
Speaker 1: energy ideal locations.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I guess one thing that we did also notice, like
Speaker 3: to your point on that little contradiction, is that hyperscalers
Speaker 3: do take a dual strategy. They're both building in existing
Speaker 3: regions and also trialing in new locations. If you look
Speaker 3: in our report, you're seeing that the large four companies
Speaker 3: they're building with in their own data center clusters and
Speaker 3: also like looking for new markets at the same time.
Speaker 3: And they're doing that because for them, speed and scale
Speaker 3: of development is really critical, particularly because like their AI
Speaker 3: business requires them to kind of take a like a.
Speaker 1: Winner is that it's like a there's a computing power
Speaker 1: arms race happening, yeah now, and so it's all very
Speaker 1: well saying, oh, we'd ideally build it here, but it's
Speaker 1: like we just need this right now, and we're going
Speaker 1: to do what's tried.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Like, I guess it's like a winner takes all game
Speaker 3: in the AI business. So they want to build data
Speaker 3: centers as quickly as possible, So they're taking all options.
Speaker 1: They want their their particular AI model to be the
Speaker 1: Coca Cola of AI. So what does all this mean
Speaker 1: for the power sector? I mean, how is this going
Speaker 1: to affect the supply mix just keeping up with all
Speaker 1: this demand? How's it going to affect the regulatory model?
Speaker 1: You know, it's not designed for just suddenly having loads
Speaker 1: of new demand dropped on a in very concentrated regions,
Speaker 1: as we I've just learned. And then you know what
Speaker 1: innovations are we seeing to try and cope with all
Speaker 1: of this new demand in the power sector.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what we're currently seeing is a very strong
Speaker 3: reaction towards all of this new data center demand, particularly
Speaker 3: from utilities. So in Ohio, where I guess there's a
Speaker 3: lot of new investment in data centers, what we're seeing
Speaker 3: is ap Ohio, which is the utility in the region.
Speaker 3: They've proposed a new tariff which in that tariff they've
Speaker 3: acquired or requested that new data centers pay up to
Speaker 3: eighty five percent of their projected energy usage, which makes
Speaker 3: it less attractive of a market for these data centers
Speaker 3: to want to build in that region. In a way,
Speaker 3: it's to prevent increasing retail rates from a utilities perspective,
Speaker 3: but there's a lot of pushback for installment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's I mean, because that's controversial because the entire
Speaker 1: basis of the regulated monopoly is providing equal access to
Speaker 1: all consumers, even if those consumers that are being discriminated
Speaker 1: against our massive corporations, still does undermine the philosophical basis.
Speaker 1: So I'm kind of interested to see what's going to
Speaker 1: happen there. What do you think's going to mean for
Speaker 1: the supply mix, you know, wind, solar, gas, what's going
Speaker 1: to do it?
Speaker 2: So I think one of the emerging innovations in moving
Speaker 2: from you know, this hyperload growth environment and there's not
Speaker 2: much supply available is this trend of colocation or having
Speaker 2: on site generation. A lot of traditional grid planning was
Speaker 2: for that peak power, and I think we saw this
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago, and you know a lot
Speaker 2: of taxes and how they integrated crypto mining is having
Speaker 2: these as flexible loads and curtailing during hours of peak demand.
Speaker 2: We know that non crypto workloads like AI training or
Speaker 2: inference may not necessarily curtail, but we do see one
Speaker 2: model in which they'll have some sort of on site
Speaker 2: generation or colocation supply where they could as a whole
Speaker 2: campus interact with grid needs in terms of the total
Speaker 2: supply mix. A lot of the short term needs means
Speaker 2: that they'll build whatever technology is fastest, and in our
Speaker 2: data most of that is when solar batteries, but reliability
Speaker 2: is also a huge part of data centers. They're known
Speaker 2: for having five nines, which is ninety nine point nine
Speaker 2: nine nine percent uptime, which means that you know, firm
Speaker 2: capacity like natural gas generation or diesel gent chats that
Speaker 2: they've used traditionally will also be a large part of
Speaker 2: the solution in the short term.
Speaker 1: So it's a real bit of an open question there.
Speaker 1: It's either how quickly things can get built and what
Speaker 1: truly is the fastest solution versus the long term needs. Helen,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us today.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Ton and Natalie, thank you so much for
Speaker 4: joining Thanks Sam.
Speaker 1: Day's episode of Switched On was produced by Cam Gray
Speaker 1: with production assistance from Kamala Shelling.
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