49
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Nearly half of the US data centers planned for 2026 are getting delayed or canceled because nobody stockpiled enough transformers and circuit breakers
Link information
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- Title
- Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed
- Authors
- Joe Wilkins
- Published
- Apr 2 2026
- Word count
- 410 words
Moving a bit slower doesn't seem like a bad thing since it will encourage efficiency improvements. Just since the start of the year there have been some interesting research papers about improving inference efficiency.
I suppose that's one way to look at it. Another might be that there's a huge rush to build out infrastructure to support an anticipated demand that will very likely never materialize, and externalities like this could be the catalyst that makes the bubble more apparent earlier.
But sure. Let's get them inference models nice and tight for the Big Kablooie. Maybe the inconceivable will happen and they'll accidentally churn out an AGI to make moot the mess the tech bros and trillion-dollar tech conglomerates created. I'm beginning to think that's the real goal anyway.
We don't have a Moore's law for LLM's like we do for chips, but my guess is that something similar will happen: it's going to get more efficient and usage will grow at the same time.
Funny, I thought the same thing about motor vehicles but it hasn't worked out that way in a couple of decades.
And when more efficient use was demanded, cars got larger and rebranded as trucks.
Yeah, that did happen. You know what else happened? 146 miles per gallon equivalent.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=48374
One for sale for $39.5k with 10k miles and another for $38.5k with 13k miles. Without doing any real homework towards finding a great deal.
I was mostly just making commentary how the automakers have fought regulation like whiney 4 year olds repeatedly and without fail. They'll probably complain about how us being able to opt out of continuous tracking will murder everyone.
Yes, EVs are awesome. Were even objectively better back when they were first invented over 100 years ago. If society optimized for quality and not price we never would have had ICE cars and avoided much of the environmental hell they wreaked.
But anyhow, this does not negate that for the most part, increased efficiency is not a given, and automakers will cheat and decieve just as readily.
A 1980 Toyota Corrola got on the order of 25-40 mpg. Pretty much in the same ballpark as a 2025 Corrola, 45 years on. A lot of the low-hanging fruit was plucked in the 70s gas crisis. They resorted to faking emissions tests as they started getting tougher.
You're not gonna get me to disagree with any of that. But now we are super far off of the topic of the thread.
I'll leave it at: corporations are gonna corporation. Anyone that thinks they won't try to maximize profits while minimizing costs is naive. Regulations and an involved public are critical to managing the excesses of corporations. Similarly, anyone that thinks their favorite auto company - churning out ICEs for generations - is any different than Phillip Morris is blind at the best and willfully ignorant at the worst. VAG, GM, Honda, Renault, Toyota, Hyundai - they aren't our friends. They're polluters selling us the drugs we don't want to admit we are addicted to. They'll slowly be regulated and driven by the market to find ways to sell us EVs when they have no choice.
Edit: typo.
Clarification: these comments aren't directed at you, vord. Instead they're directed at the state of affairs.
The 1980 Toyota Corolla has impressive numbers because it's operating under different guidelines for how to estimate MPG from the EPA. Those guidelines changed in 1984 and 2008. If they were operating under today's standards, they'd be much lower because we assume now that drivers will use AC and drive faster.
We're not going to get dramatic efficiency improvements for airplanes or cars because they're limited by the laws of physics. However, a Prius does have pretty good gas mileage and many electric cars have pretty good range nowadays.
Meanwhile, there are no law of physics or mathematical proofs preventing some researcher from coming up with a new AI algorithm that's either much more capable or equally capable but much cheaper to run. For all way know there's some undiscovered algorithm like the Fast Fourier Transform that will dramatically improve things. More likely, it will be a slog with steady improvements coming over the years.