A Power Shortage Could Short-Circuit Nvidia's Rise
Original: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
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As Nvidia's AI ambitions continue to surge, a looming power shortage threatens to derail its rise, sparking a lively debate about the future of energy production. Commenters pointed to the challenges of building data centers, citing not just GPU availability but also power and cooling constraints, with some suggesting that locations with cheap hydro or geothermal energy, like Iceland, are poised to become major players. While some advocated for nuclear power, others countered that its lengthy build times – often over a decade – make it less viable than solar plus batteries, which can be installed in weeks. The discussion revealed a surprising consensus that innovative energy solutions are needed to support the AI boom.
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They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs.
The big question is were to build them. There are only a few places with cheap and plentiful power. One of those is Quebec (but it's not that big and there is a lot of regulation). Another is Texas (except their grid isn't very stable). And the last is China. And you can't build a datacenter in China unless you're Chinese.
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Maybe the current admin (which is big on deregulation) will make it easier to build power plants, especially nuclear ones.
Edit: I wrote this comment four days ago. I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly getting a bunch of replies to it. Apparently when HN does a second chance, they just reset the time on all the comments. Odd, but I guess it makes sense knowing what I know about how the sorting is calculated. It's probably the easiest way.
It makes more sense to go for PV plus batteries that can be installed in a matter of weeks
Load-bearing parenthetical!
> Nuclear power plants take something like a decade to build
The most-recently completed fission power station on this planet needed 23 years under construction and it is still in testing. A recent American one took 15 years.
The brits let all that technical capability wither and could not do it again right now.
But if someone was willing its still theoretically possible. Just takes total alignment between government and private.
The problem is that if you dont start correcting that hardness now, the next time you think you might need a nuclear industry, its still hard.
You need to train, grant experience and give money to professionals so they can exist to build stuff. It took the UK ~ 15 years to get started, then they were cranking them out like no ones business.
Think of it this way, in 15 years you can have something you might need, or you can guarantee you wont have it whether you need it or not.
Thing is its the same for all large infrastructure products. But only in nuke do we have people actively trying to prevent the industry from being created and maintained so they can use the unreadyness as an excuse.
You have to tack on a few slow builds that create talent and local knowledge for that, or poaching people from China Operation Paperclip style maybe.
Apparently Japan is the fastest builder (46 months).
the 10 year+ issue is a western problem.
> The company has apparently been thinking outside the box to meet its power needs, with Musk stating a couple of weeks ago that it intends to buy a power plant from abroad and import it into the US to provide energy for its data centers.
Sort of a baffling statement. Quebec is gigantic. It would be a top-20 nation, by extent, if it were a nation.
Has a lot of hydroelectric and the nights get super-cold, so you could open the roof for free ventilation
They aren’t big on deregulation at all. They’re big on selective regulation. They’re also big on killing any power project that isn’t oil or coal.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-renewable-ene...
We are in for a painful lesson on why China’s investment in renewables wasn’t just good for their ecology.
As a short teaser: Landauers principle suggests that the energy required to erase one bit off information is bounded from below by k_BTln(2). This could lead us down a path towards reversible computing, to avoid energy costs for deleting information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
The carnot cycle on waste heat is bad
If you're doing something much more valuable with the power, then buying a lot of PV from China makes sense. If you think the panels are being unfairly subsidized then buying a lot of PV from China is effectively having the Chinese government pay you to have cheap power.
There's an enormous difference between being dependent on short term consumable resources,.and acquiring multidecadel productive assets.
The US at all points seems to not understand it's relationship with China at all.
They literally only "hurt" you if you have the local industry to harm to begin with. Otherwise, if someone else is paying the subsidy, it gives you a good for cheaper than you could have had otherwise.
The current admin just turns this up to 11 with their ideologically driven nonsense.
It wouldn't make any sense, but it would be provocative, really drive engagement.
[1] https://seia.org/news/solar-tariff-impacts/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/31/nx-s1-5522943/trump-offshore-...
Or I am overthinking it and solar is something that (D) politicians support so the (R) president tautologically must oppose it. Therefore we must not have nice things
Farmers make more money from wind turbines on their land than their crop. https://ambrook.com/offrange/farm-finance/there-will-be-wind
And that is stable money, works without rain, which crops don't.
That's what tariffs do ... if you leave them in place for extended periods of time.
The problem is that nobody is going to bet their business on what the tariffs will be tomorrow when it could be 10x or zero.
Businesses are just going to stop and hold their breath until Trump goes away.
I would have thought so.
If so building data centres near hydro or geothermal plants (I'm from New Zealand where we have a lot of both) would make sense
- AI backend providers vertically integrating into energy production (like xAI’s gas plants, or Meta’s local generation experiments),
- renewed interest in genuinely efficient computing paradigms (e.g. reversible/approximate computing, analog accelerators),
- a political battle over whether AI workloads deserve priority access to power vs. EVs, homes, or manufacturing, alongside an increase in energy prices.
You need cheap, reliable power + political/regulatory willingness + cooling. That’s a very short list of geographies. And even then, power buildout timelines (whether nuclear, gas, or grid-scale solar+batteries) move at "utility speed", which is decades, not quarters. That doesn’t match the cadence of GPU product launches.