Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panicking
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Re: Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panicking
#2Many good points, but with respect, electricity costs in the US are near the lowest of any large economy (see, for instance, https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/estimated-fin...).
Re: Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panicking
#3Many good points, but with respect, electricity costs in the US are near the lowest of any large economy (see, for instance, https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/estimated-fin... ).
Thank you for reading! The prices in the iea chart seem to be a few years old.
This list (https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/) has US prices at 14.9 US cents/kwh and China at 10.8 US cents/kwh as of Q2 2026.
Tbh hard to tell how accurate those are either.
The larger issue is that (apparently) new US data center bills aren't getting connected to the grid because of lack of capacity (and the lack of planned growth in that capacity) compared to the very high growth in Chinese installed capacity.
Re: Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panicking
#4Many good points, but with respect, electricity costs in the US are near the lowest of any large economy (see, for instance, https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/estimated-fin... ).
Thank you for reading! The prices in the iea chart seem to be a few years old. This list ( https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ ) has US prices at 14.9 US cents/kwh and China at 10.8 US cents/kwh as of Q2 2026. Tbh hard to tell how accurate those are either. The larger issue is that (apparently) new US data center bills aren't getting connected to the grid because of lack of capacity (and the lack o…
Averages aren't super useful for data centers, since local costs vary so much, and because siting decisions are often made around power generation (ie, they're deliberately getting lower than average costs).
Re: Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panicking
#5Many good points, but with respect, electricity costs in the US are near the lowest of any large economy (see, for instance, https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/estimated-fin... ).
Thank you for reading! The prices in the iea chart seem to be a few years old. This list ( https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ ) has US prices at 14.9 US cents/kwh and China at 10.8 US cents/kwh as of Q2 2026. Tbh hard to tell how accurate those are either. The larger issue is that (apparently) new US data center bills aren't getting connected to the grid because of lack of capacity (and the lack o…
Those are retail prices. I expect data center prices to be a tenth or even a hundredth of that. And probably quite different even in the same region.