This AI Electricity Stopgap Needs a Big Caveat
Caterpillar is helping AI companies bring their own power capacity to data centers.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The captains of artificial intelligence are an impatient lot. There’s good reason for the existence of the Silicon Valley cliché “move fast and break things.” They are certainly moving fast on the buildout of AI infrastructure, rolling out eye-popping spending budgets to buy computer chips and construct data centers to house them.
You can imagine their frustration upon discovering that the wait is years for the normal process of connecting their data centers to the electricity grid. When presented a shortcut — bring your own capacity and we’ll let you skip to the front of the line — these captains of AI didn’t hesitate.