**Americans are rallying against data centers. Surprisingly few are getting built**

> People really don’t like AI data centers. AI See all topics Facebook Tweet Email Link Threads Link Copied! Follow People really don’t like AI data centers. Politicians are running against them . A recent Gallup poll showed 71% of Americans oppose them. Several counties and states have proposed or passed laws to ban them . But this notion that AI data centers are quickly popping up everywhere is belied by the fact that their construction faces massive hurdles – regardless of whether anyone wants them in their backyard or not. Delays Construction delays are nothing new: Historically, around 72% of scheduled data center capacity comes online on time, according to Goldman Sachs. But only about half of the AI computing capacity scheduled to activate between now and 2028 via data center construction is actually expected to come online by its target date, Goldman Sachs said. Data centers typically take 18 to 24 months to build, but completion times are getting stretched as delays are getting worse. Despite $750 billion in AI infrastructure investments this year alone, according to JPMorgan, data centers are struggling to get shovels in the ground. About 60% of data center capacity planned for completion in 2027 hasn’t even begun construction, according to JPMorgan. Another 7% of projects that have gotten underway have since been delayed. Data center buildings are under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., September 23, 2025. A total of eight data center buildings are planned to exist on the campus. Shelby Tauber/Reuters The planned American data center boom is absolutely massive. The United States had 5,427 data centers at the end of last year, according to Stanford University’s AI Index Report . That number is set to nearly double: AI companies have announced plans for 3,969 new US data centers, according to Aterio , a data center research company. Of those, just 802 are currently under construction. There’s reason to believe many of those nearly 4,000 planned data centers were never real to begin with: Developers typically submit many simultaneous applications across multiple regions only to pick the most viable one, noted Goldman Sachs. That’s why, of the 565 gigawatts of computing power AI companies are currently planning (more than 10 times today’s power), Columbia Business School real estate professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh expects just 180 gigawatts to actually get built over the next decade. Two-thirds of the pipeline is “implausible,” he says. That still amounts to about $10 trillion of investment – 50% bigger than the next-biggest spending boom from the 19th century railroad expansion. But sand is accumulating in the AI gears. That overwhelming demand for data center buildouts has vastly outstripped the industry’s ability to supply it. What’s behind the delays? Materials shortages : Building materials have become difficult to source because of surging demand. Even if construction materials were readily available, the chips that the massive buildings house are in short supply. That’s particularly true for Taiwan’s TSMC, which fabricates virtually every leading AI chip, including Nvidia’s Blackwell and AMD’s MI300X. That makes TSMC “a single point of dependency in the global AI supply chain,” according to Stanford University’s AI Index report. Power shortages : AI’s massive strains on the electrical grid have caused a significant supply and demand imbalance. Data centers already account for roughly 8% of US electricity usage, and that could grow to 12% by 2028, the American Edge Project, an AI data center advocacy group, predicts. To compensate, many AI companies are building their own electricity-generation plants. But that pla...

**来源信息**
- **来源**：Hacker News：AI 热帖
- **分类**：行业
- **发布时间**：2026-08-06 22:52（北京时间）
- **原文**：[打开原文](https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/business/ai-data-center-construction)