Ramez Naam

speaker

373 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Ramez Naam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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It's no longer needing permitting and local opposition and wait times connected to the grid.

It works in some places.

About a third of data centers that we think will get built this year are doing some version of that, maybe as many as half next year.

But there's a lot of debate.

When you do that, you probably have to overbuild by 30%, 50% to have the spare capacity.

And you end up with problems.

You end up with local air pollution issues, like those power plants Colossus, Colossus 1, probably exceeded their permits.

There were lawsuits.

You end up with noise.

When you hear people complaining about data centers making noise, data centers themselves are quiet.

But these generators behind the meter are really loud.

So this works best in rural areas out in the middle of nowhere.

And so you'll see people doing that.

I think almost every data center really wants to have a grid connection ultimately.

Nobody wants to manage their own power plant.

But people, your time to power is everything.

Let me put this another way, just economically for your listeners here.

If you look at the cost of electricity going into a data center versus the revenue it generates, it generates energy.

$20, $30, $40 of revenue per dollar it spends on energy.

So time to getting it hooked up is everything.

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