Carlo CocuzziAI Expert, Pod Cast Host, Real Estate Investor and Funding Specialist

There is $10 trillion in AI data center capex that can't be built

17 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:06

AI data centers need hundreds of megawatts of power, but the grid won't deliver new capacity until 2031. Sodium-ion batteries and solar-plus-battery plants could help, but space-based data centers would need five or six Starship launches daily, which isn't feasible for decades.

Chapters

In the US, if you put in a request for hundreds of megawatts of power to build a data center today, good luck getting that power before 2031. That's the situation that we have today. So new technologies like sodium-ion batteries could drop the cost of batteries by a factor of 10. We already have the very first solar-plus-battery baseload power plants, and they're affordable. Batteries are plunging in cost and are going to drop another 10x ultimately.
Do you believe that thesis that solar in the long term is going to dominate beyond everything else?
The reality is, look, everybody's heard Elon talking about space-based data centers. So 10 gigawatts a year is like 5 or 6 launches of Starship a day.
Unless we hit that exponential absolutely full on and go right down that path, This looks prohibitive for 15, 20 years.
The biggest unlock that we cannot predict of AI and power will be—