In Santa Clara, Calif., where the world’s biggest supplier of artificial-intelligence chips is based, Digital Realty Trust Inc. applied in 2019 to build a data center. Roughly six years later, the development remains an empty shell awaiting full energization. Stack Infrastructure, which was acquired earlier this year by Blue Owl Capital Inc., has a nearby 48-megawatt project that’s also vacant, while the city-owned utility, Silicon Valley Power, struggles to upgrade its capacity.
I work in a high power field and we straight up cancel projects because we get quoted six year lead times more and more often. We can’t absorb the lost revenue.
There are some places that have grown so quickly, like downtown Denver, that capacity is just completely tapped out. And you either pay millions for feeder upgrades that won’t be ready until 2032 or you just move on.
Sometimes we ride in on the coattails of a data center that pays for the upgrades and leaves a few MW left over, but even electric service equipment never had its lead times fall since the pandemic. Projects that used to take eight months now take two years or longer. Not an easy time to be agile.