{"id":436195,"date":"2026-08-14T02:00:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T19:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/the-ai-buildout-is-truly-one-for-the-ages-436195\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T02:00:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T19:00:23","slug":"the-ai-buildout-is-truly-one-for-the-ages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/the-ai-buildout-is-truly-one-for-the-ages-436195\/","title":{"rendered":"The AI buildout is truly one for the ages"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>I have been writing all year about the unbelievable size of the AI builtout in terms of spending and corporate capex. This is a great chart to put it into perspective and note that he dates are much more compressed than anything previously.<\/p>\n<p>What still puzzles me is exactly where all the money is going.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t a buildout like railroads where you need steel mills and enormous amounts of workers. Instead, estimates on some data centers are that 80% of the costs will go straight to Nvidia with a good portion of the rest going to rack components and whatnot. The actual building part &#8212; the part that distills into the economy &#8212; might be 5% or less of the spending.<\/p>\n<p>That makes me skeptical that some of the historical multiples apply.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, these are tremendously energy intensive operations and the building of power generation is a classic broadly-dispersed exense that will flow through factories and raw materials. Some of the numbers around the power generation are truly mind-blowing and what scares me is that I don&#8217;t think there is the capacity for it to keep up with data center demand.<\/p>\n<p>This is from ZeroHedge:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>How mathematically impossible is the energy math behind the data center rollout? Just Texas alone is facing 474GW of interconnection requests (ERCOT), of which 90% is data centers. Which is why gov Abbott froze rollout of new data centers in Texas. <\/p>\n<p>For context, ERCOT all-time peak demand record is 91.1GW on July 22, 2026, with normal demand between 40 and 80GW.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, that&#8217;s peak. In a more realistic scenario, Morgan Stanley sees the entire US short about 80-100GW through 2030, or a deficit of about 100 nuclear power plants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That sounds like a big problem and there is a very real scenario that if these data centers actually get built on time, they won&#8217;t be allowed to connect to the grid for years.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>                            This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have been writing all year about the unbelievable size of the AI builtout in terms of spending and corporate capex. This is a great chart to put it into perspective and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-market-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}