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Notes -
I think Abbott is at least partially swaying with the political winds here, but ERCOT's 100% increase in the last two decades pales in comparison to their forecast of 300% growth in the next 6 years. I think there are probably legitimate questions of capacity buildout at much higher rates than baseline, and "not committing to anything further" doesn't sound entirely foolish.
On the third (gripping) hand, I really question the hyperscaler economic case where they're able to pay N times the current price for huge amounts of energy, but the proles will still have enough money to pay them for AI services and for utilities. I don't know about everyone else, but "paying to chat with Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT" falls pretty low on Maslow's heirarchy of needs for me, well behind "keep the lights on and HVAC going". Even if they expect B2B to pay the bills, consumers are still an important part (ultimately, the endpoint) of the economy: it can't be B2B all the way down. Models are getting more efficient and I somewhat expect that quite a few use cases need less hardware than currently forecast.
It's pretty obvious all of those DCs aren't going to be built, at least not any time soon (within the next few years); the hardware can't be built that fast and there isn't enough construction capacity. But a moratorium means you're doing none of them.
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