https://arab.news/jm37j
For the past two years, the dominant narrative about artificial intelligence has been one of boundless possibilities. Larger models, trillion-token training runs and record-breaking capital expenditure cycles have reinforced a sense of uninterrupted acceleration. But technological change is rarely so straightforward — and this time is no exception. As AI moves from experimentation to real-world applications, the limits imposed by the physical world, capital markets and political systems clearly matter more than its theoretical potential.
The most immediate constraint is electricity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US, where data center power demand is expected to rise from about 35 gigawatts to 78 GW by 2035. Northern Virginia, the world’s largest cloud infrastructure cluster, has already effectively exhausted its available grid capacity. Utilities in Arizona, Georgia and Ohio warn that new substations may take almost a decade to build. A single campus can require 300 megawatts to 500 MW, enough to power an entire city. Silicon can be manufactured quickly; high-voltage transmission cannot.
Markets are responding with the speed and ambition one would expect. Hyperscalers (the major tech firms building advanced AI models on the back of ever-greater computing capacity) have become among the world’s largest buyers of long-dated renewable energy. Private solar and wind farms are being built expressly to serve cloud facilities and some firms are exploring next-generation small modular reactors to bypass slower municipal infrastructure.
