One of the reasons I made sure my house was set up for solar is that our local energy provider is projecting 10% price increases per year, every year, for the next ten years due almost entirely to the demands of AI. They're hardly alone.

AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.

This didn't get emphasized enough: that's 2.5% of GDP being shoveled into an asset with an IRS depreciation schedule of 18 months. It's not like you buy the chips and can use them for a hundred years, like rail. It's not like you can buy the chips and hook up to them twenty years later, like all that dark fiber from Global Crossing. No, you've got roughly two years to ROI that shit based on... what. Last year OpenAI lost $5b to make $5b in revenue. This year its losses are unknown, it's annualized its earnings to $10b and for some reason it's worth $325b.

JP Morgan Chase research had a great quip about Houston after Hurricane Harvey - "Natural disasters are great for GDP but terrible for the economy." Musk is running his datacenters on diesel.