Silicon Valley wants the Washington bureaucracy to build national infrastructure projects to beat the communist's central planned economy?

Obviously a spoof post. If there as a demand for this electricity Private Equity would have already built it quicker, cheaper and more efficiently

Yes, it's another instance of uncapitalist socialism at work in the USA. The USA pretends it is capitalists, but really it is not. With the utterly mind-boggling sums handed out to 'private' companies with no risk to said private companies, endless subsidies for farmers, and so on, the USA is not a symbol of capitalism. The same receivers of this largesse are the first to peer down their noses at 'lazy' people burdened with healthcare costs. They just need to put their back into it, and it will be A OK.

The USA is an oligarchy.

As long as we get statues with huge shiny biceps

It's worse. A Kakistocracy.

"Private Equity would have already built it quicker, cheaper and more efficiently"

Private Equity isn't stupid (I may be wrong). They aren't going to sign up for infrastructure development unless there's some guarantee that the customer (and revenue) will be there in the long term.

Silicon Valley is more like sports team owners. Build us a new stadium or we'll move your home team across the country. So the politicians build it (to avoid the wrath of the fans) and the team is sold anyway.

Surely sober responsible public servants wouldn't waste tax payers money on facilities purely for the benefit private industry ?

US AI data centres chew through more power in an hour than France uses in a day or something.

Those meeting summaries had better be worth it.

Best we can do is cut green energy because it hurts the ruling party's contributors who pay more than you, lizardboy.

build 100 gigawatts of additional electricity generation capacity per annum

that would seem to be about 100 average Nuclear power stations per year - they take a long time to build and commission:

"A typical nuclear reactor produces 1 gigawatt of power per plant on average."

From: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-how-much-power-does-nuclear-reactor-produce

Unless the USA has a lot of old, but still safe reactors 'mothballed' at the moment, I'd be interested to know if this is at all feasible. (And no, I don't think that asking an AI 'entity' how to do it would produce a practical answer.)

It's not that difficult.

Build one on the first day, 2 on the second day,4 on the third day etc and you have 100 GW in a fortnight.

AI wrote a Python script to prove it.

100 gigawatts of what though? A quick google indicates that most of that 429 GW of new capacity added in China is wind and solar. Another quick google and some basic math shows that wind and solar in China are running at about a 17% capacity factor. That is, they actually output only the equivalent of 17% of their nameplate capacity when you take into account that they can't run at full capacity all the time (this is pretty normal). This will compare to say a well run nuclear power plant that can run at 95% capacity factor over multiple years.

Let's put it another way, 100 GW of wind and solar is only equivalent to 17 GW of nuclear.

So if they are talking about adding 100 GW of wind and solar capacity in the US, then that amounts to (assuming similar numbers as in China) of 17 nuclear power plants per year. That's still a lot, but nowhere near the same problem.

Of course an electric utility would would be taking on a huge risk to build new generating capacity just to feed the AI bubble in the US as it is quite likely that this capacity would never be used once the bubble pops. If they can bring old plants back on line that is a safer option as it is likely those plants will in fact never be required to operate.

What an I saying? It’s been ridiculous for years now. But even so…

I suspect it is just a big pile of debt, excess power production and data centres as well as some facilities that were being built when the bubble pops.

If the end goal is to provide nuclear power for AI, then this is indeed just a great big pile of debt. China has motives for building nuclear power other than providing billionaires with cheap power.

Of course, OpenAI wants the US tax payer to underwrite the costs. Socialise the costs, walk away with the profits.

If oil and nuke can’t keep up it’s a hell of a way to re-encourage renewable energy since it’s not good enough for EV anymore. According to the orange orca.

I'm pretty sure astrophages are the solution to the problem.

Pretty sure fusion is the solution

A couple of Mt airburst over the right place.

> the US has a history of "thinking big, acting big, and building big."

Just, you know, not since landing on the moon. Close to sixty years ago. As Frank Sobatka put it, "We used to build things in this country. Now we just put our hands in the next guy's pocket."

But we're really, really good at it !

Nailed it.

If OpenAI needs the power then surely OpenAI can provide the capital investment to build it? This is, after all, how freewheelin' capitalism worked back the Gilded Age. But, instead of constructing it, taking the risk and (maybe) reaping the reward they'd rather either buccaneer style rob everyone else of their power or lean on the 'guvmint' -- aka "We, The People" -- to provide it for them.

Invoking China's is just another of those missile gap lobbying tactics**. Maybe they should copy the Chinese and figure out how to run AI levels of processing while using a lot less power than they do at the moment?

(**The "Missile Gap" was a Really Big Deal in the 1950s, it was floated by the MIC as the reason why we had to spend big on their missiles etc. because it was clear that The Russians were overtaking us, we were falling behind.)(Yes, the self same "Russians" that we all know today.)(The Gap was thought to be by many back then a bunch of BS. Post Cold War we learned that our suspicions were well founded -- the 'Gap' turned out to be a figment of the MIC's Marketing/Lobbying imagination.)

(In a rather ironic twist it appears that these days the "Missile Gap" is now very real but we're so busy chasing casino profits that we're too stingy to invest over the long term in just about anything unless it yields that "twelve and a half percent" -- or more -- that the parrot is always going on about.)

The Trump administration is propping up the big AI companies and giving them the illusion of strategic importance and legitimacy. In return, the big AI companies are making a case to justify Trump's push for "Big Beautiful Coal".

It's really not that complicated.

Somebody just needs to find a way of building a bunch if 4GW coal powerplants before next financial quarter.

We could sell them Drax, what's the import tariff on power stations?

I hate to say it, I really do, but they did.

China is now an engineering nation. The USA is now a lawyer nation.

Reality beats fantasy every damn time.

Need: fat lady singing icon: ---------------------------->>>>>

No amount of downvoting and bitcoin mining is going to save you from reality.