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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 14/08/2026

An example: OpenAI's Stargate Abilene has about 824MW of usable IT capacity crammed into 998,000 square feet. The entire city of Bristol - 495k people, 1.16 billion square feet - takes around 774MW. A city's power crammed into a space that's 1172 times smaller. bsky.app/profile/smac...

Why Is It So Hard To Build A Data Center?
As I wrote a few months ago, data centers take absolutely forever to build — 18 to 36 months, if not longer — because they’re some of the single-most-ambitious infrastructure projects in history, condensing cities-worth of power into a relatively-small campus.

I’ll give you an example. The British city of Bristol is approximately 42 square miles large, or around 1.17 billion square feet, with a population of 495,300 people. Though this is an old estimate, this article has it drawing around 6782GWh (gigawatt hours) in 2013 — so, divided by the hours in a year (8760), Bristol has around 774MW of power draw.

Stargate Abilene, OpenAI and Oracle’s perennially-delayed 1.2GW capacity data center, will (if completed) span 998,000 square feet, and have around 824MW of critical IT load, with the vast majority of it going to racks of GB200 GPUs and CPUs and the cooling necessary to stop them melting, all compressed into a space that’s approximately 1,172 times smaller than the city of Bristol, all while taking up around 50MW more power. For those taking notes, the PUE of Stargate Abilene is approximately 1.46.

Oracle wants to build five more of these.

Smack54 -stop calling it SI-@smack54.bsky.social

I look at this abd think 'where's all the electricity to power these things hoing to come from?' Like when do the rolling blackouts for residential areas start to allow the slop factories to keep running?

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Pim de Groot @mifune.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Now I also wonder what will happen if they lose internet and the entire thing goes idle. Losing a significant portion of 824MW in the span of a couple minutes can’t be good

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