Intangible Assets.

News Items Weekend Edition.

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1. A regulatory dispute in Ohio may help answer one of the toughest questions hanging over the nation’s power grid: Who will pay for the huge upgrades needed to meet soaring energy demand from the data centers powering the modern internet and artificial intelligence revolution? Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are fighting a proposal by an Ohio power company to significantly increase the upfront energy costs they’ll pay for their data centers, a move the companies dubbed “unfair” and “discriminatory” in documents filed with Ohio’s Public Utility Commission last month. American Electric Power Ohio said in filings that the tariff increase was needed to prevent new infrastructure costs from being passed on to other customers such as households and businesses if the tech industry should fail to follow through on its ambitious, energy-intensive plans. The case could set a national precedent that helps determine whether and how other states force tech firms to be accountable for the costs of their growing energy consumption. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

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2. Although renewable energy is attracting more investment worldwide, a significant bottleneck has emerged: inadequate power grids. One estimate suggests that solar and wind facilities capable of generating electricity equivalent to 480 nuclear reactors remain unconnected to transmission networks in the U.S. and Europe. In Asia, the South Korean government rejected U.S. asset manager BlackRock's application to build an offshore wind farm in January, citing a lack of available grid capacity, according to local media. Last year, the world added about 560 gigawatts of renewable power capacity, a 64% increase from 2022, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). However, many of these projects lack grid access because they are located in areas without thermal or other power plants, and the expansion of grid infrastructure has not kept pace with the rapid growth of renewable plants. (Source: asia.nikkei.com)

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3. Leopold Aschenbrenne:

You can see the future first in San Francisco. 

Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans. Behind the scenes, there’s a fierce scramble to secure every power contract still available for the rest of the decade, every voltage transformer that can possibly be procured. American big business is gearing up to pour trillions of dollars into a long-unseen mobilization of American industrial might. By the end of the decade, American electricity production will have grown tens of percent; from the shale fields of Pennsylvania to the solar farms of Nevada, hundreds of millions of GPUs will hum.