Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts
The current building rate would require the equivalent of almost 30 GW of additional power each year, including roughly 20 GW for IT equipment and the rest for cooling, distribution and resilience. REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Whether that growth materializes depends on demand for AI compute holding up. McKinsey notes that although corporate interest in AI remains high, implementation is uneven: 71 percent of organizations report "negative implementation outcomes," while parts of the ecosystem exhibit bubble-like characteristics.
- ▪The current building rate would require the equivalent of almost 30 GW of additional power each year, including roughly 20 GW for IT equipment and the rest for cooling, distribution and resilience.
- ▪REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Whether that growth materializes depends on demand for AI compute holding up.
- ▪McKinsey notes that although corporate interest in AI remains high, implementation is uneven: 71 percent of organizations report "negative implementation outcomes," while parts of the ecosystem exhibit bubble-like characteristics.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/08/11/building-up-the-us-power-grid-wont-be-wasted-even-if-the-ai-bubble-bursts/5285563 |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:31:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T10:35:46.216Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T10:35:46.216Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | KAkVwcflSxcQ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); ON-PREM Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts The bigger risk is underinvestment, claims consulting biz McKinsey Dan Robinson Dan Robinson IT INFRASTRUCTURE REPORTER Published tue 11 Aug 2026 // 11:31 UTC US power companies must decide how much capacity to build for soaring datacenter demand, knowing that some planned facilities may never materialize and the AI bubble could deflate.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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