alt Hacker News> Another company, which then bought the largely finished canal, cheap, they had potential profit... until tech change (railroads).
Absolutely right. Somebody may buy the DCs. The tech changes very very fast, the DCs may be entirely worthless. US has high energy costs, it can never be cost competitive.
Why Data Centres Will Change the World and Bankrupt Their Builders — John Hempton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY5YyPLfqp0
Useful (like solar, airlines, fiber), but it won't be profitable. High capital cost, low marginal cost, subject to competition and with technical improvement --> these four factors guarantee businesses will never be profitable, and they go bust.
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The UK has even higher energy costs and people seem to want to build data centers here? (Or at least they say they do - looks more like land speculation to me):
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/map/electricity_industria...
“When the dot-com bubble happened, it was largely driven by companies that couldn't turn a profit or had P/E ratios in the hundreds. I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert on financial bubbles, but I've never heard of a bubble where the companies involved had such a modest valuation based on their earnings, even if their earnings (and therefore their evaluations) are enormous.”
Do you know the situation with rail, canals, etc?
> US has high energy costs, it can never be cost competitive.
A non-trivial percentage of that is artificial.
When push comes to shove and enormous profits (and anything remotely resembling national security) are at stake, the US is decent at removing artificial problems.
You've already seen a ton of that related to chips and data center build outs.
Why is solar more expensive in the US than China? Mainly tariffs. Same for batteries.
Why is nuclear more expensive in the US than South Korea? The government.
Why is SMR never going to beat conventional nuclear if you remove artificial problems? Physics. Though specialized applications will be viable with SMR.