This is just speculation but I think the people making these decisions are not really as interested in building these data centers as they were in planning/announcing them. They have to know it’s a bubble and many of these will become obsolete as the bubble pops and 90% of AI companies crash and burn.

Basically I think the entire economy is a pump-and-dump and announcing that you’re building a morbillion data centers inspires confidence in investors. Actually building them is less important.

Those delays, it seems, are due to a key bottleneck: electrical components manufactured abroad. Batteries, electrical transformers, and circuit breakers all make up less than 10 percent of the cost to construct one data center, but as Andrew Likens, energy and infrastructure lead at Crusoe’s told Bloomberg, it’s impossible to build new data centers without them.

“If one piece of your supply chain is delayed, then your whole project can’t deliver,” Likens said. “It is a pretty wild puzzle at the moment.”

As demand for those components far outpaces supply in the US, data center firms have had to source those components from manufacturers in Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and China. That leads to longer build times as those complicated parts are sewn together with assemblages of other, smaller parts, before being shipped across the ocean, and eventually trucked to the final construction site.

So no, it seems to be about more mundane components. Power generation is another bottleneck—doesn’t matter if you build the data center if you can’t power it!

The loans to fund these data centers are also becoming riskier.