Infrastructure · Trend

Energy & data centers

Power, grid access and cooling have become the binding constraint on AI build-out.

Trend strength 8/10

Momentum +3/q

Confidence high

Status rising

Forecast horizon

Energy policy and AI policy merge; siting, nuclear and efficiency turn into governance questions.

Connections

Connections · 2

How this node ties into the rest of the map, and the evidence behind each link.

Larger clusters bind on power and cooling.

Power limits make efficiency a first-order concern.

Signal sources

Dated facts from primary sources in this direction.

Training compute for frontier AI models grew ~4–5× per year from 2010 to 2024 — a trend Epoch projects to continue toward 2030.

Global data-centre electricity use is projected to roughly double from ~485 TWh (2025) to ~950 TWh by 2030 — about 3% of world electricity.

The price to query a GPT-3.5-level model fell from $20.00 to $0.07 per million tokens between Nov 2022 and Oct 2024 — a 280× drop in ~18 months.

DeepSeek disclosed its open-weight R1 reasoning model's final training run cost just $294,000; R1 was released under open weights on 20 Jan 2025.