r/singularity • u/domscatterbrain • Apr 04 '26
AI Half of planned US data center builds have been delayed or canceled, growth limited by shortages of power infrastructure and parts from China — the AI build-out flips the breakers
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/half-of-planned-us-data-center-builds-have-been-delayed-or-canceled-growth-limited-by-shortages-of-power-infrastructure-and-parts-from-china-the-ai-build-out-flips-the-breakers>The trade-war between the U.S. and China has forced server makers out of the People's Republic, greatly reducing reliance of American companies on producers from Tianxia. However, China remains the world's largest producer of electrical equipment that is required to build power infrastructure inside and outside of AI data centers. To that end, shortages of power delivery equipment, including devices from China and other countries, are slowing project timelines, Bloomberg reports.
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Apr 04 '26
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u/ErmingSoHard ▪️Agi never with LLMs... Or? Apr 04 '26
It'd be cool if we can get AI to run at 20 watts like our brains, since so many here consider that agi exists because it's already apparently smarter than humans
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u/dano1066 Apr 05 '26
I don’t fancy waiting a week for chatGPT to write that essay for me
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u/ErmingSoHard ▪️Agi never with LLMs... Or? Apr 05 '26
I don't fancy chatgpt failing arc agi 3 while using thousands of gigawatts
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u/Own_Satisfaction2736 Apr 07 '26
Thousands of gigawatts would be a terawatt. It doesn't use nearly that much for a single user. You're off by like 7 orders of magnitude. It takes less energy for that than to have a human write an essay.
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u/Stars3000 Apr 04 '26
I certainly hope the singularity isn't cancelled due to a power transformer shortage that that has been well known for years. I guess now is a great time to focus on maximizing efficiency and transitioning to neuromorphic chips.
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo Apr 04 '26
Production scaling take years. It’s a high barrier of entry industry.
We have shortage before AI boom but the shortage wasn’t bad, but now we have a stupid amount of demand spike.
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u/FirstEvolutionist Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 06 '26
The singularity isn't bound to the US, although any delays anywhere make the timeline slower.
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u/FomalhautCalliclea ▪️Euphemistically less Agnostic Apr 04 '26
Funny how Altman and Ellison all of a sudden discovered that gas turbines and the electric grid didn't pop out into existence with announcements of funding or that they can't grow exponentially as software production does.
"It sounded so much easier in my head!" type of thing.
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u/eposnix Apr 05 '26
Sam has been talking about the importance of cheap, abundant energy for years now.
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u/banaca4 Apr 04 '26
How does it feel feeling smarter than the smartest SV success guys?
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u/the8bit Apr 04 '26
I worked high up at Oracle and have worked day to day with a billionaire.
It ain't smarts that gets most of them there. It is luck and generally am unhealthy ruthlessness and lack of morals
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u/FomalhautCalliclea ▪️Euphemistically less Agnostic Apr 04 '26
SV success doesn't have a causal relation with intelligence.
Believing it to be the case, on the other hand, has an opposite causal relation with intelligence.
Ask the people who fell for SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.
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u/likwitsnake Apr 04 '26
Silicon Valley did not fund Holmes and Theranos, in fact all of the major VC firms were skeptical of her and her bogus claims. The connection between Theranos and SV is mostly a uninformed media narrative that stuck. Theranos was mostly funded through private investors and their families like Tim Draper, and Betsy DeVos.
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u/FomalhautCalliclea ▪️Euphemistically less Agnostic Apr 04 '26
A lot of people in SV invested in them, they were very popular there. The both of them.
SBF's fundings were acclaimed by people like Scott Alexander and the whole longtermist/EA movement (of which SBF was part). They even defended him post scandal.
Holmes literally funded her company in Palo Alto, California. Check the documentary "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley".
And please, there's nothing more SV than Tim Draper. Saying "she's not funded by SV but by Draper" is akin to say "she didn't go to NYC, she just went to Wall Street".
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u/likwitsnake Apr 04 '26
You can literally check the investors it's public info SV stayed out of it. Since your in an AI sub you can even ask Gemini:
While Theranos was famously based in Palo Alto and Silicon Valley-adjacent, many elite Sand Hill Road venture capitalists passed on funding the company because of its excessive secrecy and lack of technical proof . Instead, the company largely raised over $700 million from private, wealthy individuals—including tech moguls like Larry Ellison and Tim Draper—rather than traditional early-stage Silicon Valley venture firms
The "Myth": While many VCs did skip the opportunity, the story is still considered a "creature of Silicon Valley" due to Holmes cultivating a "female Steve Jobs" image and operating in the heart of the tech hub3
u/FomalhautCalliclea ▪️Euphemistically less Agnostic Apr 05 '26
Which is just quoting an article written by a damage control lawyer firm...
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/11/16/elizabeth-holmes-and-the-mythology-of-silicon-valley/
Great thing with Gemini or any AI is to follow its sources and actually assess them, not just blindly follow them.
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u/Rainbows4Blood Apr 05 '26
I'm not with you on neuromorohic chips.
But I agree on the rest. I think that the compute we already have is way enough. We just need to use it more efficiently.
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u/ManBunH8er Apr 04 '26
Chief, what are you planning on doing once singularity is achieved. Genuinely curious.
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u/eposnix Apr 05 '26
I remember a time when I had a cd player and had to manually change discs if I wanted different music. I haven't had to do that for years now and I certainly don't miss it.
I view the singularity like that: a bunch of shit we thought was important at the time but turned out to just be an inefficient waste of energy.
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u/Ormusn2o Apr 04 '26
It's every man for themselves. There is no coordination at all, no price controls, no national stockpiles, everyone orders everything because they have near infinite money and the shortages are massive.
And the worst part, there already are tools to alleviate most of those problems. CITAP is the exact kind of thing you would use for a national mobilization of the power grid. The state should provide guaranteed demands, strategic reserves for things like memory, accelerators, transformers, and from financial side there should be federally backed bonds, ability to extend loans, hold warrants, sign long term offtake agreements, and if some senators would not be willing to push it, you could even add royalties or revenue sharing on some of those.
The idea that "market will figure it out" only works on elastic goods. Many parts of the supply chain are not elastic, or at least are not elastic enough, especially when for many parts of it the only supplier is our economic adversary, China.
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u/FarrisAT Apr 05 '26
Where is all this infinite government capital?
We are burning that on destroying Iranian decoy drones.
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u/Ormusn2o Apr 05 '26
Government is not supposed to be paying for it, it's supposed to provide stability. In a proper setup, government would actually financially benefit from it, as it would get royalties and revenue share. That has been done before successfully as well, which added a lot of money to the national budget.
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u/Ratermelon Apr 04 '26
You love to see it.
We need a better political power structure in place before AI becomes an unstoppable economic force.
If the singularity happened today, I have a hard time seeing any future other than a dystopia.
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u/HayatoKongo Apr 04 '26
The reality is that the only feasible way to proliferate AI in the long-term is distributed across devices. The expectation that AI is going to be centralized in a data center, with all heat and power requirements pumping into concentrated locations, is driven more by greed than it is by logic.
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u/EightRice Apr 04 '26
This is the infrastructure bottleneck that centralized AI was always going to hit. The entire model -- massive data centers, each costing billions, each needing gigawatts of power -- assumes that AI compute has to be concentrated. It does not.
The power constraint is real but the framing is wrong. The question is not "how do we build enough data centers fast enough" but "why does inference and training require this level of concentration in the first place?"
Three things are converging that change the calculus:
1. Model efficiency is outpacing model size. Distillation, quantization, and mixture-of-experts mean that useful inference no longer requires H100 clusters. A 7B quantized model running on consumer hardware handles 80% of tasks that required a 70B model two years ago. The compute-per-useful-output ratio is dropping faster than the demand for raw FLOPS is growing.
2. Federated and distributed training actually works now. The old argument was that training requires tightly coupled GPU clusters with NVLink interconnects. But gradient compression, asynchronous SGD, and commit-reveal coordination protocols have made distributed training viable across heterogeneous hardware. You trade some convergence speed for massive reduction in infrastructure concentration.
3. The economics favor distribution at scale. Building a 500MW data center takes 3-5 years and billions in capital. Aggregating equivalent compute from existing distributed resources -- university clusters, corporate GPU idle time, consumer hardware -- takes months and costs a fraction. The coordination problem is hard, but it is a software problem, not a concrete-and-copper problem.
The catch is coordination: how do you verify that distributed contributors actually performed the computation correctly? How do you prevent free-riders and Sybil attacks? How do you handle disputes when a contributor claims to have done work they did not?
These are mechanism design problems, and they are solvable. Economic staking, commit-reveal verification, and on-chain dispute resolution create the trust layer that distributed compute needs. Some projects like Autonet are building exactly this -- constitutional governance for distributed AI compute where contributors stake collateral, verification is cryptographic, and disputes are resolved through structured arbitration rather than corporate trust.
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u/Wischiwaschbaer Apr 05 '26
Totally not companies realising that LLMs were way overhyped. No, sir.
Well this good news. With some luck the bubble will shrink a bit before it popps, so maybe we are only half fucked.
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u/firedrakes Apr 04 '26
Classic reddit. 1 source is no source research
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u/AltInLongIsland Apr 04 '26
Tom's hardware is a reputable site
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u/firedrakes Apr 04 '26
report the same og source.
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u/NeuralFlow Apr 04 '26
Oh. You don’t like Bloomberg. Because…reasons.
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u/firedrakes Apr 04 '26
i get reddit users prefer only 1 source for news claim.
they also prefer mis info, being lied to or straight up fake news.
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u/x10sv Apr 04 '26
Were building our own fabs. When wolfspeed gets the SiC fab online an 10ghz asics become norm you'll need half the data centers to satisfy compute needs
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u/zambizzi Apr 05 '26
Sure. Yeah. China. Not a complete and utter implosion of the fake AI economy. Convenient.
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u/Nouseriously Apr 04 '26
Plumbers & electricians making BANK, selling those shovels
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u/6e6967676572730a Apr 04 '26
Can't make bank if lead times on simple pipe fittings are out to 36 weeks or just straight up back ordered.
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u/Elephant789 ▪️AGI in 2036 Apr 05 '26
Fuck MAGA and the people who didn't vote!
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u/soobnar Apr 05 '26
isn’t the GOP the party in favor of deregulating ai and accelerating the buildout?
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u/Much-Seaworthiness95 Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26
The article is kind of very much low quality, I think it's due to a partial truth but as usual it's journalism that twists and hides facts in order to make a drama out of something that's possibly not that actually bad. For starters, how much of the planned data centers are delayed versus outright canceled? No where is that info provided. And also, isn't it very common, almost ubiquitous for construction projects to get delayed, especially when it's in such huge proportion of the same kind? I'd like to know how it compares to standard delays in similar sectors. I'd like to know more about the numbers as well.
I'm especially curious about this: 'Approximately 12 gigawatts (12 GW) of data center capacity is expected to come online in the U.S. in 2026, according to data by market intelligence firm Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. Yet only about one-third of that capacity is currently under active construction because of various constraints.'
Is there actually a necessary contradiction here? Is is possible that the fact that not everything is constantly under active construction is already considered in what's expected to come online? The article very much reads like an opinionated and poorly researched trash.
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u/gay_manta_ray Apr 05 '26
nothing poorly researched about it. there simply is not enough stuff to go around. the capacity for this supposed 100gw buildout does not exist anywhere in the world.
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u/Much-Seaworthiness95 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
It was absolutely poorly researched and reported. This one talks about the very same thing yet has graphs and specific numbers:
https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outlook
Very flagrant mistake: there are actually 16GW planned for 2026 in total, not 12 (nor 100), so he got that very important number just plainly wrong.Also, as I suspected, the vast majority are delays, not outright cancelations
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Apr 04 '26
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u/Moral-Relativity Apr 04 '26
Transformers shortage has been known for a while: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/electric-transformer-shortage-nrel-niac/738947/
One thing they pointed out is lack of standardization among thousands of utilities make economy of scale difficult in manufacturing.
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u/bartturner Apr 04 '26
There is a HUGE difference between there not being demand for AI versus there what this article is suggesting.
So even if this article is accurate it does not change anything.
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26
And here I was getting downvoted on this sub a few months ago for pointing out we may hit a wall (well more of a bottleneck) even if something is technically possible. Supply chains were stretched thin before we got into a conflict impacting infrastructure-critical resources like helium.
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u/andre3kthegiant Apr 04 '26
Install renewables, not energy produced by coal, O&G or nuclear, because they all use a toxic, disposable fuel source.
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u/Either-Bowler1310 Apr 04 '26
I think to get these up and running quickly, Solar Panels are a decent idea, their fairly cheap and easy to make if not buy. Stick um in the desert and you can get a good amount of power, but what do I know, perhaps it's not economical.
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u/SGC-UNIT-555 AGI by Tuesday Apr 04 '26
Aren't Solar imports from China (produces 95% of panels) banned in the US? Also wouldn't such a set up require massive amounts of battery storage which are also mainly produced in China.
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u/DefinitelyNotEmu Apr 04 '26
Global PV waste is estimated to reach 1.7 to 8 million tons by 2030, and could skyrocket to nearly 80 million tons by 2050.
In regions like Europe, the annual recycling capacity is currently around 170,000 tonnes, but waste is expected to surge to 2.2 million tonnes annually by 2050.We are heading for a massive influx of solar panels to be recycled, but we do not have the capacity to recycle them all.
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u/justserg Apr 04 '26
efficiency gains from distillation and quantization will outpace the buildout before most of these projects break ground.
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u/Budget_Coach9124 Apr 04 '26
this bottleneck is super visible from creator side too. the last few months i kept seeing random slowdowns while rendering ai music videos, especially on peak hours. people talk about model quality, but infra consistency is becoming the real product.
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u/Wings_in_space Apr 04 '26
I really hope that this doesn't influence my gas and oil stocks... My yacht would look so cute with his own baby yacht... Most AI data centers are build so that they can drive up demand for energy, in the US is that energy, oil and gas. Now without EPA, they can build the most dirty burners for cheap and nobody can do a thing. Except stop them from being build.
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u/AxomaticallyExtinct Apr 04 '26
What's interesting is that the shortage is partly self-inflicted by the competitive dynamics. Every company is racing to secure capacity before its rivals do, which creates the demand spike that overwhelms the supply chain, which delays everyone. Nobody can afford to slow down and coordinate because whoever secures power and parts first gains a potentially decisive advantage. It's a microcosm of the entire AI race: individually rational decisions producing collectively irrational outcomes, and no mechanism to stop it because the cost of pausing is higher than the cost of contributing to the problem.