The power wall: can the grid keep up with AI compute?
The bottleneck for the next phase of digital infrastructure is not chips or fibre. It is electricity.
David Okafor
Data Centre Correspondent
The defining infrastructure question of the next decade is deceptively simple: where will the power come from? AI training and inference are driving rack densities and campus power requirements far beyond anything the data-centre industry was built for.
Why this is different
Previous demand cycles could be met by building more space. This one runs into hard physical limits — grid capacity, transmission queues and decarbonisation commitments — that cannot be solved by capital alone.
The implication
Geography is being redrawn around power. Markets with abundant, clean, dispatchable electricity will win the next wave of capacity, regardless of where the fibre already runs.
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