Slate Newt asked, and Nib — askNib's tutor — drew the answer live at a whiteboard. This is the spoken transcript; enable JavaScript to watch it drawn.
explain the power supply supply chain of gigawatt scale datacenters
A gigawatt datacenter needs as much power as a city of eight hundred thousand people, running all day, every day.
That power starts far away, at a power plant, and travels down a chain of stations before it ever reaches a single chip.
Grid power alone isn't trustworthy enough — so onsite, diesel generators and battery rooms stand ready to catch every outage in milliseconds.
The real bottleneck isn't electricity — it's the giant transformers and gas turbines. They take two to five years to build, and the queue is years long.
So building a gigawatt datacenter isn't really about chips at all — it's a race to secure grid capacity, transformers, and turbines years in advance.
Chips get the headlines, but the true scarce resource behind AI's growth is grid power, transformers, and turbines.