The problems, in their own words.

“when the company were told that a grid connection would take 3 years”

Hacker News, March 2026

“Your "not instant" is many years, and longer than the timeframe these companies want to wait.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“the inference cluster in the same operating loop to avoid waiting years in an interconnection queue.”

Hacker News, June 2026

“Also gas turbines are on backorder until 2029, and new grid connection queues on a similar timescale.”

Hacker News, June 2026

“You can build gas power plants on site at your data center and don’t have to wait for the grid to be upgraded.”

Hacker News, June 2026

“grid hookups usually get done in units of years, you don't just call the power company and order one.”

Hacker News, July 2026

“for the several years it might take before the grid is ready for them.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“created a queue to connect to the grid that outpaces the annual rate of connections by over an order of magnitude.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“It's that the grid literally cannot support the amount of datacenters being built.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“Attaching to the grid, at the powers desired, in the locations desired involves years of waiting beyond construction.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“All the inner connect space for grids is used up and the wait for hardware and installs is massive.”

Hacker News, September 2026

“Almost 30% of new AI data centers are self-powered at least for the first few years until they can get a sufficient grid hookup,”

Hacker News, October 2026

“Because they don’t want to wait for a grid connection that can take years and they need backup generation capacity anyways.”

Hacker News, October 2026

“the grid connection takes a lot of time to establish”

Hacker News, October 2026

“The Texas ERCOT grid has such limited capacity available for new customers that I do not expect to see more than a very few connections for several years.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“The gap between the acquisition stage estimate and reality is real, and it's usually not about queue position slipping. It's driven by what the impact study actually finds once it runs: an unplanned network upgrade, a neighboring project dropping out of the queue and reshuffling shared upgrade costs, or the utility discovering it needs a new bulk transmission element to serve the load. Those show up mid process and can each add a year or more on their own.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“To get an electricity grid connection takes ~10 years, to get a gas connection takes 6 months, so naturally data centres are just choosing the later.”

r/unitedkingdom, May 2026

“Money won't fix it cus the limit is physical. New substations and wires take years...”

r/unitedkingdom, May 2026

“Overall demand compared to the actual queue, check out the NESO demand queue for DC projects. Investors will not sit and let their money be idle waiting for these projects to be ready to fund.”

r/datacenter, July 2026

“Power scaling is a must. I just had a project delayed 12 months(hospital) because the DC the system was going into didn't have enough power and it took hospital facilities 12 months to get the capacity upgrade.”

r/sysadmin, September 2025

“The chips from those new deals don't have anywhere to go,”

Hacker News, March 2026

“OpenAI who doesn't have facilities or power to deploy them.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“There are massive numbers of data centre GPUs sitting in hyperscaler warehouses waiting to be deployed in a data centre.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“is waiting to be installed because the new datacenters haven't been built yet.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“MS bought more GPU's than they had rack space for:”

Hacker News, July 2026

“a large portion of HBM and cards are sitting in storage, waiting for the data centers and the power plants to run them.”

Hacker News, September 2026

“Only last year Microsoft admitted to having GPUs in inventory that they couldn't power, due to a lack of electricity.”

Hacker News, October 2026

“The bigger issue is probably that all of these things start stacking up. You can have the location, GPUs and funding sorted, but still be stuck waiting on a grid connection, transformer, etc.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“I recently supported a POC liquid cooled GPU build and the colo had never handed liquid cooling before. Some of these were blockers due to know having been aware of the requirements beforehand.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“Also hardware is very inflated right now because too much has been bought. So much they cannot even power it. Electricity is the bottleneck nowadays, but we should get back to normal once AI frenzy slows down”

r/datacenter, April 2026

“I saw it get purchased before the datacenters were built. Lotta inventory waiting on rack space.”

r/datacenter, November 2023

“Hetzner managed servers competes on price w/co-location for me because I'm in London.”

Hacker News, February 2026

“Colocation for HFT tends to be expensive and using 5% of the space for the same amount of data might make sense.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“With liquid cooling and extremely dense power capability. Your typical colo or closet server room isn't going to cut it.”

Hacker News, July 2026

“IMO the demand for general capacity (AI, web services, storage, etc.) is far outpacing supply.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“A major consideration is power density — AI racks require 30-50 kW+ compared with the only 5-10 kW for traditional colo, so not much existing space will be usable without any modifications. So look specifically for high-density or liquid-cooled colocation options.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“Under ~100kW the Tier 1 names mostly won't respond; mid-tier and regional operators in Dallas, Columbus, SLC and Reno will.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“My co workers are struggling to find cages big enough and I’m personally looking at four month lead times just to get racks delivered”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“If a provider quotes you per rack or per square foot, they're pricing legacy space and you'll find that out at commissioning. Turnkey at this density usually means a suite somebody has already retrofitted, and those are the hard thing to find right now.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“in any case...you are well beyond $3k/month, so as long as you are ok with a longer break even point you can definitely find a home for it.”

r/datacenter, December 2025

“The mega campus demand gets most of the attention, but 1 to 5 MW still matters for inference, enterprise AI, and wholesale colo where buyers need capacity sooner and cannot wait years for larger builds. The challenge is finding sites with real power availability, not just marketed capacity.”

r/sysadmin, May 2026

“The only thing I have seen has been 1/2 of a rack at a time, and although speedy the internet connection is available it isn’t free”

r/sysadmin, August 2026

“In major cities, you are looking at around $150+, just for the space and you pay for power and bandwidth. Since its less than a quarter cabinet, you can likely expect a setup fee as you will need someone to either escort you or pay for remote hands. Can easily run you $300+/month plus a $1000+ setup fee depending on your commitment.”

r/sysadmin, August 2026

“This used to be a thing but it's often too expensive now as others have mentioned. They'd give you a key card and a key to your rack etc. It was really cool but these days it's cheaper just to rent space on their hardware.”

r/sysadmin, August 2026

“In Toronto, this is around $500/month. I got a quote a few months ago. Ended up going with a half rack from Telehouse.”

r/sysadmin, August 2026

“The constraint where I live is down to power. If they don’t have enough power, they can’t fill the racks. So they set a budget per rack per customer.”

r/selfhosted, January 2025

“Working directly with a facility to lease a partial or full rack is generally expensive, and sometimes incurs hidden expenses like insurance requirements.”

r/selfhosted, January 2025

“I still know of a couple of centres in my country that take colocation but the price has gone up a lot and the power constraints for 2-4U are a problem.”

r/selfhosted, January 2025

“I looked into colocation in my city but all of the data centers won't even talk to you unless you want 5+ racks.”

r/selfhosted, January 2025

“Six months into capacity planning for a 2-3 MW expansion and I keep hitting the same wall. Every Tier 1 operator (Equinix, Digital Realty, QTS, CyrusOne) says nothing until late 2027 at earliest, and even that is not a firm commitment.”

r/sysadmin, May 2026

“I've taken a look at several colocation providers and even for the smallest "units", it seems to be quite a bit of money (in the range of some hundret € per month). some of them don't include power while others include a certain amount, some charge quite a lot for the network connectivity, etc.”

r/networking, December 2024

“Colo fees, commercial internet, and power will eat your margins immediately.”

r/LocalLLaMA, September 2026

“Our DC provider (Telco/DC provider) is just building a new DC here in central Europe with a starting capacity of 26 MW/2,500 racks. They are still targeting 8 KW per rack. I tried to explain to them several times that it is not enough now and definitely not enough in the near future.”

r/vmware, August 2025

“Nearby colocation facilities cannot host a 10 kW server, or their pricing is unreasonable.”

r/sysadmin, April 2026

“My contacts on the hyperscale and colo world are getting requests but they have no space left or haven't retrofitted for the power and cooling needed..”

r/datacenter, November 2023

“I've tried to host some inference on cloud GPUs and its seems like it would be extremely cost prohibitive”

Hacker News, May 2025

“It is not cost effective (instance based billing is expensive as opposed to request based billing), GPU choices are limited”

Hacker News, June 2025

“AWS you can't ever get an 80gb gpu without a long term reserve and even then it's wildly expensive.”

Hacker News, June 2025

“I wish it would, for I have tried: the problem is GPU availability which is often low or highly elastic.”

Hacker News, June 2025

“A number of people want to purchase their own hardware, not rent cloud hardware.”

Hacker News, June 2025

“Or, work entirely on cloud which is expensive, slow, and annoying.”

Hacker News, July 2025

“If I use cloud GPU's, I need to be a lawyer to be sure what they can or can't do with my data or models.”

Hacker News, August 2025

“Running a GPU in the cloud is expensive”

Hacker News, August 2025

“cross cloud communication being too expensive to setup multi cloud redundancy. Cross region redundancy is often too expensive too.”

Hacker News, October 2025

“If you buy a cloud solution, you're also stuck with the vendor deciding to double the cost of the product once you're locked in.”

Hacker News, October 2025

“Rental prices for GPUs are pretty darn high.”

Hacker News, December 2025

“Also, just availability of these things on AWS has been a real pain”

Hacker News, February 2026

“I have routinely been rejected the GPUs quotas I needed for projects.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“Renting GPU access on cloud systems can be more expensive than CPU, especially if you only need GPU processing for specific occasional run tasks.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“We weren’t ready for that, cost wise, so we would only spin them up when absolutely necessary.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“No token quota, no rate limits, just 100% GPU utilization until the job was done.”

Hacker News, April 2026

“Hosting this on my own + renting GPUs is much more expensive than DeepSeek's quoted price, so not an option.”

Hacker News, April 2026

“You lose the confidentiality, integrity, and availability benefits of local deployments.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“I'm actually looking into deploying a GPU at my company because we can not give out our code.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“I'd guess at least $100k in cloud gpu time for a single run,”

Hacker News, August 2026

“my data is too sensitive to be uploaded to a cloud of which I have no gaurantees of privacy/security.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“The total cost was about $20k, which we'd easily eat up with six months worth of equivalent Claude usage.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“Egress costs are fairly clearly a vendor lock in strategy.”

Hacker News, September 2026

“only to find stuff is either out of capacity or double/triple the price.”

Hacker News, October 2026

“many cloud services have incredibly complex or opaque pricing structures that make it difficult to impossible to determine how much something is going to cost”

Hacker News, October 2026

“Storage and GPU servers is where this argument falls down. If you want to host services with a terabyte or two it’s not so bad, once you start getting above 10/20tb it gets prohibitively expensive. And adding a dedicated GPU also increases your price somewhat.”

r/selfhosted, January 2025

“I'm planning to self-host an AI compute cluster instead of burning cash on cloud GPU rentals, and I'm trying to get realistic numbers for colocation costs in Texas.”

r/datacenter, December 2025

“If you have a high baseload which our lab certainly does, basically 24/7, then cloud services are prohibitive.”

r/HPC, September 2025

“I'm stuck at zero GPU quota on the main cloud platforms despite having credits (AWS, Google, DigitalOcean). It's really disheartening.”

r/MachineLearning, August 2025

“How long did you guys wait for the quota increase approval for the H100 80gb Gpus? I need to use 8 H100 80GB GPU's for the Llama 4 Maverick, requested today and still waiting.”

r/MachineLearning, April 2025

“Your inference pricing page has some $/Mtok costs but if I understand correctly you're actually billing time and idle capacity costs just as much as maximum utilized? Or are these shared vLLM clusters and I can really pay per token?”

r/LocalLLaMA, December 2024

“The new(er) GB200s require liquid cooling because they put out so much heat.”

Hacker News, July 2025

“This has been a pain becuase it doesn't fit into legacy datacenters as easily as the door/rack-based systems.”

Hacker News, August 2025

“Datacentres are needing basically completely rebuilt for especially Blackwell chips as they mostly require liquid cooling, not air cooling as before.”

Hacker News, October 2025

“when you retrofit data centers for the latest and greatest GPUs you have to throw away a lot of good equipment.”

Hacker News, December 2025

“Even a single NVL72 rack, just one rack, needs 120kW.”

Hacker News, February 2026

“Bringing liquid cooling to the racks likely has to be one of the biggest challenges with this whole new HPC/AI datacenter infrastructure”

Hacker News, February 2026

“The primary challenge with the current generation is the unusual increase of power density in racks.”

Hacker News, February 2026

“Are data centers already liquid cooling their PCIe 5 SSDs? It seems difficult to use these without that in place.”

Hacker News, February 2026

“They use custom water cooling that needs building-sized pumps, and so on. A Blackwell rack uses 140,000 watts and weighs 3500 lbs.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“A half rack in a rack of last decade is 8kw. A half rack of today's state of the art is 100kw.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“the fact that they require sophisticated liquid cooling infrastructure and draw 3x the power of the A100s,”

Hacker News, April 2026

“I have not seen a 500w TDP rated heatsink that is not an AIO liquid cooled one”

ServeTheHome / Chassis and Enclosures, April 2026

“Data center mech eng here - from our perspective it's higher rack densities typically due to GPUs.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“Networking is 800gbps. 120kW per rack.”

Hacker News, June 2026

“Now, it's server level direct liquid cooling with extensive water treatment and oversight on coolant parameters.”

Hacker News, July 2026

“The systems used for LLMs are several times more power-hungry than traditional servers. Like, 50-100kW per rack of B200s.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“Any DC I've been in, even 10 years ago, was not limited by getting equipment in. It's always been cooling capacity and power availability, which these AI campuses will have in spades if it pops.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“Increased power density of new racks means that space is far less of a concern that it used to be. Power availabilty and cooling capacity are more going to be your constraints for the near future at least.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“Old DC’s are not usually a good fit for new AI infra- too expensive to retrofit. Unless you get an investor willing to put a lot of $ into it, even then the supply chain to get there is severely constrained.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“labor and power are probably biggest. i’ve seen a bunch of liquid cooling systems fail since most dc folks have air cooling backgrounds. also lead times for server hoses have been crazy”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“Have past experience with running HPE Apollo 6500 with 8 GPUs and had to put it in a cabinet by itself due to the power requirements.”

r/datacenter, December 2025

“Pain point is generally convincing administration for higher needs of gpu nodes for the future in terms of cooling and power. For the current h100 installation, the server room had to be adapted to support more power and cooling as otherwise we would had brought the entire building down.”

r/HPC, January 2025

“Immersion cooling at bigger scale is nightmare so people are not willing to gamble on it.”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“Generally folks are trying to stay under 30kw per rack of air cooling so above that needs to go into liquid.”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“I never viewed it as a large scale solution, the cost barriers are far too great. I can see it being a viable way to retrofit supplemental high-density capacity to a space not designed with liquid cooling in mind.”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“The switch to LC is going to be insane because everyone who does it will basically need new rack infrastructure on top of the cooling changes.”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“you can get 1 MW/rack with water, it's just very difficult.”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“Immersion requires intensive service maintenance and is cost prohibitive as well.”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“Funny thing is, everybody is freaked out about 300+KW (800kw!) racks but most of the liquid business right now is 80KW or less. We'll get there but it's turning out to be more difficult that nVidia wants everybody to believe.”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“The biggest challenges are still retrofit costs, infrastructure changes and having the right expertise.”

r/datacenter, July 2026

“2MW would only be enough to run ~15-20 Vera Rubin racks, and that's not even factoring the cooling in. In other words, a room made for ~100-150 racks would be like 80-90% empty. So then you'd have to upsize the power feed.”

r/BetterOffline, May 2026

“I'm expecting you could shoehorn a single rack or maybe two into an old datacenter. But you're likely replacing 4-5 old racks with that one. So very floor space inefficient because of the denser cooling/power requirements.”

r/BetterOffline, May 2026

“The architecture of the building itself is likely optimized for a specific purpose, and there probably isn’t a lot of spare power capacity for those gpus, both in terms of exterior transmission from the grid and interior through the architecture. Even if there was adequate interior power delivery or if they bring generators on site, they will have a very hard time actually dumping all that waste heat into existing cooling systems.”

r/BetterOffline, May 2026

“But yeah, ultimately the move from generic data centers to AI racks = way more power, and dealing with all the problems around liquid cooling for the newer racks.”

r/BetterOffline, May 2026

“afiak you can deploy at most a couple of power shells with air cooling and there aren't any viable air cooling full blackwell racks.”

r/BetterOffline, May 2026

“30kW in a room that small with comfort gear is not a "throw in a couple extra units" situation, and the capacity math alone should give you pause.”

r/sysadmin, April 2026

“I remember reading that transformers, especially the larger kinds, are on a 3+ year backorder.”

Hacker News, May 2025

“The gas generator backlogs (~5 years) I mention in my top comment are gas generator specific, due to their specific supply chain and labor needs.”

Hacker News, May 2025

“gas turbines are sold out for the next ~6 years, which I don't believe has happened before in this century.”

Hacker News, July 2025

“New gas turbine pipeline is ~5-10 years long”

Hacker News, October 2025

“7 year lead time for Siemens power turbines, 3-5 years for transformers.”

Hacker News, February 2026

“The issue with gas (aside from emissions) is that gas turbines are a bit hard to get.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“The wait for gas turbines is still, as far as I am aware, five years.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“The large transformer shortage has been a problem for years.”

Hacker News, April 2026

“Did you know the lead time for an industrial power transformer is 5+ years?”

Hacker News, April 2026

“Apparently turbine blade production is backlogged five years now and a bottleneck on AI data center production”

Hacker News, May 2026

“any infrastructure project involving transformers will be delayed by varying amounts”

Hacker News, June 2026

“to build a datacenter it takes 1 year but to build energy infra it takes 5.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“Then, the lead time for transformers is also quite high. I'm not sure about the switch gear and meters though.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“A lot of planned data centers will never power up because the lead time for gas turbines is a few years now.”

Hacker News, September 2026

“Grid connection permits don't take as much time as, for instance, real natural gas turbines, which currently have a three to five year lead time.”

Hacker News, October 2026

“capacity isn't totally tapped yet but the lead times for new deployments are getting stupid, like 18+ months in some regions.”

r/datacenter, October 2026

“Pretty much how fast buildings can come up and the infrastructure to support it. Just because we can get the shell up doesn’t mean anything if we can get the electrical and power gear installed and certified. That’s the biggest factor atm.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“From the electric supply side, it's getting the big transmission power transformers that in good times took 2 years to build. There's multiple large distribution transformers as well. It's the rest of the HV switchgear like SF6 circuit breakers - preferred suppliers can't keep up and alternate vendors do not necessarily have the same quality.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“Generator waitlist is 5 years out, people are paying over asking to get first dibs and even then its years, labor is another huge issue but I think its a short term constraint in that regard.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“The main problem is the public infrastructure will not be able to keep up, power is slready strggling and water is showing problems already. But even the simple fiber optics suppliers for the cables, batteries, silicone for the chips and memory is struggling as well. There just not enough manufactores out there.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“Right now a standard 500-ton chiller is 30-50 weeks lead time.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“2028 is tight for anyone at that scale, the supply chain for big transformers alone is something like 2-3 years now”

r/datacenter, October 2026

“It takes several years of studies and paperwork, but that is offset by the bottleneck in waiting to have your gas turbines, generators, and transformers built, that take 3 to 4 years to build.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“These EPC's are booked for next 5 to 10 years with record backlog, and their clients essentially have to accept their timelines. Everyone wants a datacenter or power plant now, so everyone will have to wait.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“most of what reads as a shortage is really a sequencing problem.. the date that binds is the one the utility gives you for energization, and the long-lead orders (switchgear, transformers, chillers) get placed against it, so a project stalls when those two stop lining up.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“waiting up to 4 years for critical gear like substation transformers, UPS systems, and generators is insane.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“At this point, a lot of generators are running at a 5-6 year lead time.”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“Our director said the lead times for transformers was 107 weeks.”

r/datacenter, July 2026

“They need our stuff to install the GPUs. Lead times are sitting at 4-5 months so end user contracts and planning have to be in early to mid 2027.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“The fact that we've seen over 4x increase in costs for general compute components and lead times for data centre components like cooling or power systems are now huge.”

r/datacenter, October 2026

“vendor lead times are long, i think most are running 12 months at the earliest.”

r/datacenter, September 2026

“People throw out on site generation like a quick fix, but a 3 year wait for large scale equipment is its own bottleneck. Land is everywhere, but land plus deliverable power plus approval all lining up is the rare combination”

r/datacenter, August 2026

“The problem is that the shortage of substation and transmission infrastructure is structural, it is not only extremely severe now (in lead times) but it takes years and years to scale up production, unlike other equipment and demand for it (at all angles, decarbonisation, utility grid reinforcement, nuclear, generation, industry electrification as well as AI) will only increase rapidly.”

r/datacenter, July 2026

“Power equipment lead times are insane now, like generators. But getting utility providers to upgrade and build more capacity generating equipment/plants is the bottleneck.”

r/datacenter, July 2026

“So who's paying for the capital cost of this new infrastructure needed to satisfy more than doubling winter peak demand? Not to mention the labour requirements and managing lead times for materials.”

r/ukpolitics, February 2026

“12 months is actually a pretty good lead time right now. It's really the perfect storm that's capturing all the capacity in the market. Utilities are buying in surplus and data centers are massively consuming all supply both for the power generation side and data center side.”

r/electrical, March 2026

“Idk, in the past 10 yrs i havent seen lead times less than year for catastrophic can replacement, the 69-12’s are slightly faster but any larger hi sides have been much longer.”

r/electrical, March 2026

“The UK is suffering from persistently expensive electricity”

Hacker News, September 2025

“The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem.”

Hacker News, October 2025

“Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK”

Hacker News, October 2025

“Electricity became a lot more expensive in Norway after building several interconnectors to UK and mainland Europe.”

Hacker News, November 2025

“Looking at the data it seems that uk industrial electricity is the most expensive before taxes, is that not correct?”

Hacker News, January 2026

“The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty, which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously lacking.”

Hacker News, February 2026

“Look, I support Europe's push for computational sovereignty. It's frankly long overdue. But Europeans still consistently underestimate the scope and difficulty of that task”

Hacker News, February 2026

“in production without managing our own GPU clusters, while keeping data within EU jurisdiction.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“the electricity isn't any cheaper in Scotland where all the clean renewable power is.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“developers who are either paying too much for OpenAI/Claude tokens or can't use US hyperscalers due to data residency requirements.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“Ireland has challenges getting enough renewable energy to the island”

Hacker News, July 2026

“UK has expensive electricity and high-megawattage data centers are obviously not going to help with that.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view.”

Hacker News, September 2026

“Local DeepSeek, qwen or kimi models are far better privacy-wise, faster, but much more expensive (to get a 2TB GPU RAM cluster).”

Hacker News, September 2026

“Ireland has some of the most strenuous regulations in this regard, with dozens of data centres blocked over planning and environmental impact assessments.”

Hacker News, September 2026

“I'm working for a global DC provider, covering hyperscalers as a solutions engineer. One of the biggest hyperscalers doesn't want to lease any capacity anymore in Europe, due to the power pricing :/”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“I'd say the biggest differences are energy costs & regulations. Europe tends to prioritize efficiency because power is more expensive and environmental rules are stricter.”

r/datacenter, June 2026

“It is a very popular choice since most my clients want their data not only inside Europe, but inside country. I believe this is the new norm the last years.”

r/selfhosted, January 2025

“Ofgem's estimate is more than double the winter peak electricity demand to manage this, that's not a "small part" and we're already struggling with building out electricity infrastructure without data centre demand.”

r/ukpolitics, February 2026

“So we can either sit on our hands crying about this until we're completely dependent on other countries for yet another resource, or we can accept that our current approach to energy planning is woefully naive at best.”

r/ukpolitics, February 2026

“My answer is that we need to manage data centre demand holistically via queue management to manage the costs of building out infrastructure and ensure that only the most viable projects are allowed to connect and that they're billed for the infrastructure needed to connect them instead of it falling on other consumers and ensure that the physical constraints do not effect demand capacity from other areas from being managed.”

r/ukpolitics, February 2026

“If the government decided to build new nuclear power stations tomorrow they'd probably be at least a decade away from opening, and in the meantime there's an opportunity cost as that generation is used for datacentres instead of decarbonising the economy.”

r/ukpolitics, February 2026

“I don't understand how their is a queue of people wanting to build these things in one of the most energy expensive countries in the world.”

r/unitedkingdom, August 2026

“Our current grid already needs massive overhauls and upgrades to handle the shift from dispatchable fossil fuels built near cities to intermittent renewables that are often far away from population centres. More interconnectors, more batteries, most pylons are needed even if we keep demand flat. If we increase demand, not only do we need to built more renewables but we also have to make more grid upgrades.”

r/unitedkingdom, August 2026

“Because the digital infrastructure in the UK is creaking and without more capacity we will struggle to grow the economy.”

r/unitedkingdom, August 2026

“Having domestic compute capacity will be crucial in the future whether we like it or not. We can either have British ones subject to our laws and regulations, or we use ones bought abroad that aren't.”

r/unitedkingdom, August 2026

“The UK thinks AI self-sufficiency is needed for them to stay on their own two feet and maintain independent foreign policy. It’s not about it being cheaper to do than in the US.”

r/datacenter, July 2026

“Benefits are that UK customers are nearby, data residency and latemcy matters. Secondly they have a BESS for a reason, which will help them offset a lot of the electricity costs.”

r/datacenter, July 2026

“Electricity is expensive in all of Europe. That's why we have to do things more cleverly and find some other savings :-)”

r/vmware, August 2025

“Electricity is expensive in Sweden, since we shutdown some of our nuclear powerplants.”

r/vmware, August 2025

“It's on the political radar here in Ireland. Energy costs are so high they are seen as a massive contributing factor.”

r/AskEurope, February 2026

“Huge problem in Ireland at the moment. Data centres use 22% of Irish electricity and we have some of the most expensive electricity in the world but the government have to play nice to not loose out on all that big tech tax money”

r/AskEurope, February 2026

“With the amount of data stored in them, it is really important that the data centres are physically located in a country that shares our laws and values regarding personal data.”

r/AskEurope, February 2026

“Locally built datacenters can be very useful as we try to get away from US cloud services, and it's more efficient than on-premise servers since many customers can share the same infrastructure.”

r/AskEurope, February 2026

“The datacenter of my customer is located in Central Europe, and they pay $0.33 for 1 kWh of electricity in a Tier 3 datacenter facility (UPS + cooling included in energy cost).”

r/vmware, August 2025

“supply chain management, a team of engineers to design the system, a team of staff to physically rack new hardware and unrack it,”

Hacker News, April 2025

“I dont cross PSUs between groups of components and have different 20 amp circuits feeding different PSUs.”

ServeTheHome / Processors and Motherboards, August 2025

“- who gets drafted to manage and fix problems with the hardware?”

ServeTheHome / DIY Server and Workstation Builds, September 2025

“They need power, cooling, a whole infrastructure built around them.”

Hacker News, December 2025

“You need to factor in the data center, power, cooling, hands-on support, future growth, etc. You're never just paying for the hardware.”

Hacker News, March 2026

“Cooling these facilities takes vast amounts of plumbing work.”

Hacker News, April 2026

“If you start buying minis, then you need to house, power, and cool them. So you are building a mini data center.”

Hacker News, April 2026

“you’d have to have engineers, a colocation space, basically all the problems that companies didn’t like and went to AWS for.”

Hacker News, May 2026

“your limiting factor is going to be power, cooling, and complexity rather than plugging the GPUs in.”

ServeTheHome / Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and AI, May 2026

“Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex,”

Hacker News, May 2026

“Cooling, power, physical security, Internet bandwidth (and to a lesser extent, latency) are all issues if you are actually using those GPUs for a customer.”

Hacker News, June 2026

“Businesses that own their own hardware tend to have a lot of employees whose jobs are maintaining it and running the business side of that.”

Hacker News, August 2026

“The biggest problem we had with on-prem was maintenance as it took a lot of staff and time to ensure decent reliability.”

Hacker News, September 2026

“These data centres are built by people who have access to things you do not. The HVAC, power, and network components are just out of reach for the most people. Even if you could afford the hook up and monthly costs, it's highly unlikely you'll when be allowed to install in a residential zoned location.”

r/selfhosted, January 2025

“Where are you installing it? You’ll need rack, power, and cooling (don’t do liquid cooling, too complicated and expensive). Who’s going to manage it?”

r/HPC, September 2025

“Implicit in all of this is that you'll need some staff roles that are dedicated to managing HPC. Managing HPC involves everything from power and cooling, through to rack management, through to hardware and networking, through to OS and software support. And storage is always going to be a major component.”

r/HPC, April 2026

“When I worked for a university, my cluster's biggest fans were researchers who used to run their own small clusters and who then found out that the expensive part isn't buying the hardware. It's having people who can run the system, keep up on software and security updates, etc. If you grow, there are also power and cooling requirements, storage considerations, etc.”

r/HPC, August 2025

“I inherited two production clusters 4 years ago, never even knowing what an hpc was. They handed me a 700k rack and said.. build it.”

r/HPC, June 2025

“Unless you want UPS contracts, HVAC contracts, generator contracts, and the associated maintenance headaches that go with running and monitoring all of them.”

r/sysadmin, September 2025

“At the sysadmin level, you plan for two power sources, two internet feeds. Anything higher level is going to be a more apt question for electricians, contractors, and hvac people. Actual datacenter design and build-out isn't really a conventional IT/sysadmin thing.”

r/sysadmin, October 2025