"Two of the world's biggest data center developers have projects in Nvidia Corp.'s hometown that may sit empty for years because the local utility isn't ready to supply electricity. In Santa Clara, California, where the world's biggest supplier of artificial-intelligence chips is based, Digital Realty Trust Inc. applied in 2019 to build a data center. Roughly six years later, the development remains an empty shell awaiting full energization."
"The fate of the two facilities highlights a major challenge for the US tech sector and indeed the wider economy. While demand for data centers has never been greater, driven by the boom in cloud computing and AI, access to electricity is emerging as the biggest constraint. That's largely because of aging power infrastructure, a slow build-out of new transmission lines and a variety of regulatory and permitting hurdles."
Two major data center developments in Santa Clara remain unenergized because the local utility cannot supply sufficient electricity. Digital Realty and a 48-megawatt Stack Infrastructure project stand vacant while the city-owned Silicon Valley Power struggles to upgrade capacity. Rapid growth in cloud computing and AI has pushed electricity access to the forefront as the primary bottleneck. Causes include aging grid infrastructure, slow transmission build-out and regulatory and permitting hurdles. US electricity demand from AI computing could more than double by 2035, and plans for large AI complexes are shifting to states with lower power costs despite ongoing power-source development.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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