Amazon spent $75 billion in capital expenditure, mostly related to AWS, in 2024 and expects to fork out even more in the current calendar year. Similarly, Microsoft is projecting a spend of $80 billion in 2025 on infrastructure to train and deploy AI, and Meta some $60 billion on AI resources.
The total increase in capacity means that electricity grids will also require significant funding to keep pace
If you figure that datacenter operators have a lot of flexibility in where to put their datacenters – that they have few geographical constraints and can build them more-quickly than power plants can be constructed – then I’d guess that those datacenters will probably tend to be put places that reliably have a lot of supply of power.
Maybe.
At Three Mile Island, Microsoft is sticking their datacenter next door to a nuclear power plant, so I’d expect that there isn’t a lot that they’re going to need to move.
If you figure that datacenter operators have a lot of flexibility in where to put their datacenters – that they have few geographical constraints and can build them more-quickly than power plants can be constructed – then I’d guess that those datacenters will probably tend to be put places that reliably have a lot of supply of power.
There is still the issue of overall baseload power supply in a given continent.
Not to mention political risk constraints in some places.