GPUs And RAM Are In Short Supply, But The Real Bottleneck For AI Is Electricians
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GPUs And RAM Are In Short Supply, But The Real Bottleneck For AI Is Electricians
Joe Fay
Joe<br>Fay
Published<br>thu 28 May 2026 // 00:18 UTC
By design, datacenters are big capital machines. But to get<br>a handle on the scale of resources that AI and HPC are sucking in out of the<br>global economy, just consider what is happening at TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner site<br>on the shore of Lake Ontario, just outside Buffalo, New York.<br>In mid 2022, TeraWulf was pleased to announce it was in the<br>final steps of firing up 50 megawatts of Bitcoin mining capacity at the site –<br>a former coal-powered power station – 18 months after first launching. Another 50<br>megawatts of capacity was scheduled to switch on in early 2023.
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By 2025, following a 2 megawatt AI/GPU pilot at the site, TeraWulf<br>had pivoted, turning itself into an HPC/AI company, expanding its footprint at<br>the site to 157 acres and aiming to boost its capacity at the Lake Mariner site<br>to 750 megawatts. It will still produce Bitcoin on an opportunistic basis. But<br>it is clear the management and shareholders have decided there’s a better<br>opportunity to make real money by providing the infrastructure to allow other<br>people to produce AI tokens.<br>The Next Platform took a look around the site recently, along<br>with Schneider Electric. The French power kit firm has supplied much of the<br>electrical infrastructure at the site, while its Motivair subsidiary has<br>provided much of the liquid cooling technology that is now a prerequisite for<br>an AI-grade site.
Once it switched its attention to HPC and AI, TeraWulf’s initial<br>effort was the CB-1 datacenter, a 20 megawatt facility, with the 50 megawatt CB-2<br>datacenter slated for 2025. Sovereign AI specialist Core42, which is a strong<br>partner of Cerebras Systems and AMD as well as other AI system suppliers, was<br>the firm’s first banner client. It has been running AMD-based systems in CB-1<br>for the last ten months.<br>AI infrastructure specialist Fluidstack – whose operations<br>are backed by Google and who are helping Anthropic create and install its own<br>TPU systems and which is also a backer of TeraWulf – went into production at<br>the site’s CB-3 building a few weeks before we visited. So that was off limits.<br>(It may be where Anthropic has parked its initial TPU systems for all we know.)
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But we did see the CB-4 building. This is a 330,000 square<br>foot, 200 megawatt beast, dwarfing the earlier operations. It encompasses four<br>data halls, each spanning 33,000 square feet, illustrating just how much space,<br>power, and mechanical infrastructure takes up. Construction here began in<br>January. The building is in the final states of preparation ahead of flicking<br>the power switch towards the end of the summer.
Once the buildings are swept clean and powered up, it will<br>be down to the firm’s customers to install racks for whatever compute they want<br>to run and decide on exactly how they want to manage the space.<br>Sean Farrell, chief operating officer for TeraWulf, said the<br>halls were built with slab concrete floors. These are easier to build than<br>raised floors, but more importantly can support increasingly dense, and<br>therefore heavy, racks.<br>High-density AI capable racks, which are packing liquid<br>cooling kit, and potentially 800 volt infrastructure, are getting too heavy for<br>raised floors. The company has built with a spec of 8,000 pounds per rack in<br>mind and could support up to 10,000 lbs.
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Farrell described the non-compute mechanical rooms supporting<br>this building as “massive.” And yes, they are pretty enormous. The data halls<br>themselves account for less than half the total footprint. The mechanical rooms<br>handle a closed loop cooling system, with chillers and coolers in the data hall<br>capturing the heat generated by the GPU heavy racks, before heat exchangers<br>exhaust it out via roof top towers. The halls have space for fan walls should<br>customers want them.<br>No water is used in normal cooling operations, Farrell said,<br>and once “charged” the fluid in the cooling system lasts ten to fifteen years.
The company has already spent $290 million with Schneider<br>and Motivair across UPS and batteries, CDUs, in-rack manifolds, racks, rack<br>coolers, and software and services.<br>The CB-5 building next door is also 330,000 square feet. As<br>Farrell put it, the first steel in that building went in on April 1. The roof<br>is now on, and while the sides are open, the roof top coolers are being<br>installed. Farrell said the building should be “energized” by the end of the<br>year. Last year, TeraWulf announced Fluidstack had contracted for a 160<br>megawatt lease on CB-5, bringing its total commitment on the site to 360<br>megawatts.
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What the entire site doesn’t have is diesel generators for<br>backup. Oil burners are traditionally the mark of a serious datacenter – and<br>along with water-based cooling systems, and a...