That's with only about 5% of cars being electric.
We've consumed nearly all of the slack in transmission capacity.
I'm expecting transmission costs to balloon.
https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2026/q2/chevron-signs-20-ye...
The idea is to bring the data centers, power generators and energy supply together in the ~same physical space so the only thing you have to transmit is data. Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information.
But this project is still moving energy- it's just moving natural gas instead of electricity!
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
Anthropic is removing these larger models from personal plans at the end of the week to focus on selling it to enterprise users.
Putting these more intelligent new models into the hands of more people seems very worthwhile to me.
I think that it might well be true. The Opus models had capacity issues on many occasions too. Can the larger model even be served on all of the hardware they have, or only a subset?
It would not surprise me if growing enterprise demand threatens capacity, making it impossible for Anthropic to offer the model in subscriptions at this time, even though they could do so at a profit.
I am not even sure if API prices are actually profitable, but they certainly aren't as unprofitable as the subscription plan users.
Either way, that's why you don't have access. It has nothing to do with capacity constraints.
Some estimates suggest that this is the case only for the heaviest users.
Many seem to confuse API prices with the actual cost to serve the models, and thus reach the conclusion that subscriptions must be deeply unprofitable.
Anthropic is officially citing capacity constraints with the intent to bring the Fable model back to subscriptions plans as soon as capacity allows.
That's pretty much certain. It's sort of cute when people like to pretend otherwise.
> Many seem to confuse API prices with the actual cost to serve the models, and thus reach the conclusion that subscriptions must be deeply unprofitable.
I don't make that mistake. I actually suspect that the actual costs may be higher than the API prices. I think those may still be subsidized.
> Anthropic is officially citing capacity constraints with the intent to bring the Fable model back to subscriptions plans as soon as capacity allows.
Yeah, I don't think they are being truthful at all.
"Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed."
This is the reason why data centers are not run only on cheap solar power.
2. Companies realising that they are burning half million to get nowhere
3. Circular investment scaring investors
4. And more recently, companies hiring people back coz the AI aimed to replace humans, created more problems than solved them
5. Memory cartel falling apart, again, they did the same thing during 2000s
6. China is making good ML free, supply and demand, destroying the US tech token business model
7. Even META has too much computer power and no enough use for them.
Those are the main reasons why AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart faster than expected.
If the next order of magnitude costs 40B, I wonder if it’s even possible to get to the one after.
The real "AI" success story will be the person that makes an IRL backrooms theme park in the husk of a datacenter.
Or: laser tag park, the vests you wear are in part old tpu/gpu components.
We put the cart before the horse, lets stop talking about growth and focus on making it useful first lmao
And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.
The current US admin:
Trump’s Multi-Pronged Attack on Renewable Energy https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?par...
but they are slowly being beaten back:
Trump admin abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges - https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/trump-admin-abandons...
The Trumpian adventures in Iran have wrong footed his fossil fuel buddies and slowed his Don Quixote roll against giant scary windmills for now.
If you look at the overall picture, it's clear that he opposes anything not carbon based. And cost isn't a rational reason for it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-appro...
What isn't "purely political?"
Everything is political in the world, unfortunately.
US administration can try to pull a China and basically remove all regulatory barriers (following existing playbook of "do whatever we want and wait a year or two for the courts to catch up and stop us"). It'll create havoc that will make people very upset (more so than the people that already protest DCs in their backyards). But even then, it's construction on varied terrain and property over long distances; you can't predict exactly how that will go. Triple the estimated timeline and that is probably doable, but current AI investment likely can't wait that long, unless somebody can pull additional hundreds of billions out of a hat to extend lines of credit or a ponzi-scheme-esque paying-creditors-with-newly-lent-money. In that time the market will realize the hype was hype, the gains were modest, they'll start divesting, and then the house comes down.
One way around that might be to deploy thousands more gas turbines and make rural air quality look like 2010 Beijing. It will probably happen if things get really tight, and we'll see how the current administrations's base responds; if they stick it out, the market gets a reprieve.
Like:
Copper. "As the world shifts to wind energy and electric cars, demand for the conductive metal has increased. But mining copper brings its own environmental hazards"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/copper-minin...
Impacts of lithium mining on water stressed regions in Chile
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/01/c...
Impacts of rare earth refining in China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...
silicon tetrachloride from solar production
https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=831
Europe should not outsource it's ecological impact to developing countries.
FYI, a typical 1GW nuclear plant produces 30 tons, or 10m3, of high-level waste. Germany uses ~500TWh of electricity per year. So Germany could replace all their electricity generation with 60 nuclear plants and would need to find space for 1800 tons or 5km3 of waste per year.
For comparison, German landfills can accommodate 70M metric tons per year.
France, a country famous for its investment into nuclear, is not covered in nuclear waste, and does not seem to have any issue disposing of it safely.
Nuclear has its disadvantages, but painting the many people who advocate for it on HN as delusional or ignorant is not very respectful.
Silicon tetrachloride used for silicon production is toxic and has to handled carefully.
The main point is that, if Europe wants to invest more in solar power, it should also do the manufacturing in Europe and waste disposal in Europe.
For example, nuclear power is often sold as a plant that just sits there churning out zero-emissions power for 50 years from a few tons of super energy dense fuel (such as from the above commenter). Without acknowledging that fuel needs to be enriched from intensive and environmentally destructive mining of raw uranium ore. Which comes with risks to workers and possible contamination of groundwater to nearby communities, etc. Or the carbon impacts of the massive amounts of concrete/steel/etc that are required to build the plant, or the opportunity costs of spending tens of billions on a plant that will require continuing to burn natural gas and coal for another 10-20+ years until it comes online as a replacement, etc.
Otherwise it's just special pleading to apply a different standard that exaggerates the negative externalities of solar + batteries.
> plus the wind generators are ruining every single landscape we have.
Move fast and break things this is not.
Even in terms of radiation accidents, nuclear power generation pales in comparison to orphan sources from medical equipment. Yet you don't see people clamoring on about fewer x-ray or radiological machines.
> made large swaths of land uninhabitable for ~forever.
Are you talking about places besides the Chernobyl exclusion zone?
And why compare the small amount of area made dangerous by nuclear accidents to the entire planet being destroyed by fossil fuels?
And not if plants can't get cooling water because of drought.
https://www.euronews.com/2026/06/25/france-takes-nuclear-rea...
Fast forward 20 years from the advent of essentially infinite energy results in WWIII and a new “Great Detente” but only after all the assholes have wreaked all the havoc they can.
There are dark days ahead but ultimately a brighter future. Sucks to live through that transition phase though.
there are still many neighborhoods where people leave their doors unlocked because it is actually that safe. not every location is rife with criminal activity, and many are well protected.
It doesn't require a criminally minded 3rd party coming onto someone's "safe" property to do something horrible with a sawzall and/or oxy-acetylene cutting torch.
Plus, they’re ubiquitous, you don’t know who has one, max damage is minimal even worst case — go fish!
We live in a world where multiple people are killed every year by tipping vending machines over onto themselves and you propose to make nuclear reactors a mass market consumer good that goes in everyone's garage?
But I can’t disagree that it’s more exciting to imagine terror dreams.
A big potential concern with small reactors are highly toxic radionuclides; those can be much more dangerous (with LD50 far under 1mg/kg) than "ordinary toxins" like bleach or even nasty stuff like methyl isocyanate. That means expensive disposal and protection measures.
All of this is a non-concern though because there is no realistic path for nuclear reactors to compete with PV+batteries, ever. With cells already <$100/kWh and the panels being cheaper than glass windows, we will never be able to build, maintain and dispose of nuclear based reactors tech at a competitive price point, especially not with the insane current battery demand (automotive) driving technical optimisation and price competition.
The worst thing an evildoer can do is blow up your own house and the few around it. and no one does that because you go to jail forever.
The worst thing you can do is let it melt down, which means it quietly shuts itself down.
No, they can take the isotopes out and dump it into your local water supply. Or if they're suicidal and the isotopes have been encapsulated in some sort of tamperproof system, grid the whole thing down to granulated powder using less than $20,000 of power tools (disregarding their own health and the entire nearby area, of course) and then dump it into the local water supply.
1. Smaller the nuclear reactor is more neutron leakage you get. Each neutron which escapes a nuclear reactor is a neutron which can not be used to sustain the chain reactor. To compensate this you have to put more fissionable U-235 isotope into the reactor and as a result you need higher enriched nuclear fuel. A nuclear reactor in nuclear submarine can have the size of a dining table but it's running on nuclear fuel enriched to a weapon grade enrichment.
2. Even a small nuclear reactor with few kW thermal output needs a thick and heavy radiation shielding. This is not problem for power plant, or nuclear powered submarine, or nuclear powered ship. But the shielding requirement were problem for nuclear powered airplanes or trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft
In case of the mobile ML-1 experimental nuclear reactor, built as part of the US Army Nuclear Power Program, extensive shielding was omitted in favor of a personnel exclusion zone of 500 feet (150 m) while in operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1
Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the first artificial nuclear reactor, didn't have shielding. But, to keep the dose of ionizing radiation for the staff within reasonable limits, it operated only for very short time periods and the total output of CP-1 was only few Watts.