Hey there! 👋
Skander here.

You need one year to build a data center. You need seven years to connect it to the grid. Something doesn’t add up.

I spent the last year looking into this and made a 15-minute video on what I found.

Data centers consume 1% of global electricity today. Household devices (TVs, phones, everything you own) use 2%. And there’s 12 gigawatts under construction with 60+ gigawatts planned. For context: a city of 1 million people uses 1 gigawatt.

In the video I try to answer: how are data centers actually powered, and what comes next?
I cover the grid problem, Jevons paradox, gas turbines, nuclear, solar, geothermal, fusion, data centers in space (yes, really), and what happens in the 5 to 25 year gap between now and when the moonshots come online.

Quick TLDR for the skimmers:
- Gas is the answer right now. Data center developers are shipping turbines in on trucks because they can’t wait seven years for a grid connection. Elon started it with xAI’s Memphis data center. Everyone followed. The US is a petrostate and gas is available today. There are problems.
- Nuclear is probably 10 years out. Google and Amazon are already buying offtake from reactors that don’t exist yet.
- Solar is exploding. Actual installations have been 3x higher than every five-year forecast. Mostly thanks to China, which installed more than twice as much solar as the rest of the world combined.

There’s a lot more in the video. Take the 15 minutes.

👉 If you want more videos like this, drop a comment: what did you learn, what do you agree with, and what was your favorite fun fact?https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7439989512795025408/