Amazon is building a 7.65 gigawatt gas plant in the West Texas desert. Microsoft just signed a 20-year gas deal with Chevron, 30 miles away, and Meta, OpenAI, and xAI are all doing versions of the same thing.
The case for going off-grid is speed and control: an AI data center takes 18 months to build, a grid connection can take seven years, and Texas just froze new hookups altogether.But turbines are sold out into 2029, the power costs roughly three times what flexible alternatives do, and of the 90 gigawatts of do-it-yourself power plants announced, almost none has actually been built.
Nobody has better visibility into this race than Michael Thomas of Cleanview, who tracks every data center in the country, and who recently broke the news that Amazon is behind that desert project. He joins the show to walk through what he's found, and where the gas rush goes from here.
Jigar is on vacation this week, so Jamie is joined by "mini-Jigar" and friend of the pod, Tim Hade.
In this episode:
- Why Elon Musk's Colossus, the most famous off-grid data center, lasted barely ten weeks off the grid
- What happens when an off-grid turbine breaks and there are no spares
- What batteries and demand flexibility could do instead, and why companies keep saying no
- Michael's forecast for how much actually gets built by 2027
- "There is no off-grid data center, only an off-electric-grid data center."
- Fermi America's "world's largest data center," whose site sat empty on satellite images
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