America’s AI data centre boom is getting bogged down by red tape and the daft insistence that they be built in hot areas with poor power and water supplies.
The Financial Times wrote: “Delays to a swath of new US data centres threaten to slow the rollout of AI by the world’s biggest tech companies, with almost 40 per cent of all projects due this year at risk of falling behind schedule.”
Big builds for Microsoft, OpenAI and other tech outfits are set to miss their completion dates by more than three months, according to SynMax data shared with the Financial Times.
More than a dozen industry executives reckon campuses aiming for hundreds of megawatts are being stalled by permits and chronic shortages of labour, power and kit.
Those snarls are turning into the awkward bit of the AI story, because they slow the conversion of eye-watering spend into revenue.
Hyperscalers are racing to throw up ever-larger sheds, pushing sites that will draw at least a gigawatt of electricity, roughly a nuclear reactor’s output. Research group Epoch expects a handful of these monster projects to be completed this year, including builds by Amazon Web Services, Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI.
The likely slippage elsewhere shows a widening gap between AI investment hype and the unglamorous business of delivering infrastructure.
Applied Digital, chief executive Wes Cummins said: “Financing at this scale is hard. Logistics are hard. Construction and operations are hard.”
SynMax tries to pin down completion dates by using satellite imagery to track work from land clearing through to foundations. It then cross-checks progress against industry benchmarks from IIR Energy, which draws on public statements, permit documents, and on-the-ground interviews.
One of the bigger headaches lies in Shackelford County, Texas, where a 1.4 GW campus is being developed for Oracle, which plans to kit it out with chips and provide computing capacity to OpenAI. The 1,200-acre site is meant to host 10 buildings, and Vantage Data Centres said in August that the first building was due for delivery in the second half of 2026.
Satellite imagery shows land cleared for six planned facilities, but as of early April, only one showed signs of development. SynMax reckons the earliest possible delivery for the first building is December, while a schedule that matches most comparable projects would shove it out to late 2027.
