This article is a very, very, very good read and shows the huge boon data centers can bring to places. It also makes clear that data centers are not for everyone or for every place.
At this point in 2026, roughly $260 billion in canceled investments have been announced.
To quantify these potential losses, this analysis uses existing estimates of the economic contributions of large data centers to calculate the impacts of canceled investments. Based on these calculations, the $260 billion in canceled investments in 2026 represents the equivalent of approximately 1,207 foregone data center projects. During the construction phase, which typically lasts between 18 and 24 months, these projects could have supported more than 2 million jobs and generated approximately $94 billion in wages, $294 billion in local economic activity, and $12 billion in state and local tax revenues.
Overall a well written and researched article.
You have to account for what was ultimately done with that $260 billion, though, because it doesn’t just sit idle in a Scrooge McDuck vault.
If it just ended up funding different data center projects, then the net impact of the cancellations will be marginal.
Agreed! I am sure a lot of it is also just being held right now as they try to navigate the rate increases because data centers are going to be hit pretty hard by that.
USA lacks the power generation capacity to win the AI competition.
AI data centres will cost US consumers power cuts and huge increase in power prices.
China won the trade war and USA is losing the petrodollar hegemony that its Zionist owners have long enslaved the world with.