Tagged power infrastructure · show all articles
GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, and Hitachi Energy don't make chips, GPUs, or anything that touches a datacenter's compute. Their combined order backlogs from the AI boom now exceed $180 billion.
Every briefing in this cohort eventually runs into the same wall: not a chip shortage, but a power shortage. The industry has enough silicon ambition. It doesn't have enough electricity infrastructure to plug it into.
More than 2,100 gigawatts of proposed projects are waiting for grid interconnection approval in the United States — more capacity than the entire national grid currently has. AI datacenters are only part of that queue, and they still can't skip it.
This cohort has covered wafers, EUV tools, and HBM stacks as the inputs that limit chip supply. Electricity access belongs on that same list now — not as a downstream side effect, but as a hard constraint on deployment itself.
OpenAI's custom-accelerator agreement with Broadcom is larger than any other single deal in this cohort by power commitment. This briefing works through the numbers, the timeline, and what building at this scale actually requires.
Most accelerator deals get announced as a unit count or a dollar figure. AMD and OpenAI described theirs in gigawatts of power consumption — a framing that says as much about the industry's real constraint as it does about the chips themselves.