https://www.newscientist.com/article/2465408-trump-backed-stargate-project-could-strain-the-us-energy-grid/This week, OpenAI and other tech companies joined US president Donald Trump at the White House to pledge a private investment of half a trillion dollars in US data centres over the next four years. The “Stargate Project” could power an ambitious expansion of AI technology – with repercussions for the US electricity grid and the country’s energy future.
The Stargate announcement comes as North America has been experiencing surging electricity demand in recent years. The grid is already straining to keep up and faces a growing risk of power outages. Data centres are the fastest-growing factor in US electricity demand, with each one capable of using as much energy as tens of thousands of US households. Adding even more load on the grid could put large regions of the US and Canada at risk of electricity shortages.
“The difficulty is not getting the capital to build the data centres and buy the [computer chips] – it is finding enough power for them,” says Benjamin Lee at the University of Pennsylvania. “There would need to be a corresponding investment in energy generation, energy storage and transmission infrastructure to support these data centres.”
The full scope of Stargate’s potential impact on the US grid is unclear because the announcement lacked details on the size and power requirements for the planned data centres. At the White House announcement, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Stargate has already begun construction on 10 data centre buildings that each cover more than 45,000 square metres at the project’s first site in Texas. He also mentioned plans to build data centres in 20 other locations across the US.
