Compute meets the grid
AI capacity planning has become an electricity problem. Interconnection queues, transformer lead times and cooling water now determine build schedules more than chip supply does.
The signal
Data centre developers are signing power agreements years before breaking ground, and siting decisions increasingly follow grid capacity rather than customer geography.
Industries involved
Technologies
Liquid Cooling
Moving heat away from servers using liquid — either cold plates attached to chips or full immersion in a dielectric fluid — instead of moving air.
Small Modular Reactors
Nuclear reactors in the roughly 50–300 MW range, built from factory-produced modules rather than assembled entirely on site.
Long-Duration Storage
Storage that discharges for ten hours or more — iron-air, flow batteries, thermal and mechanical systems — as opposed to the four-hour lithium standard.
Companies to watch
Modal
Serverless cloud for running AI inference and batch jobs.
New York, United States · Founded 2021
CoolIT Systems
Direct liquid cooling for high-density servers.
Calgary, Canada · Founded 2001
X-energy
Developer of the Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled small reactor.
Rockville, Maryland, United States · Founded 2009