Ep. 018 - Stop Saying Half of 2026 US Datacenter Capacity Is Canceled (Datacenter, Energy) | Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Reyk Knuhtsen, Ellie Holbrook, Jordan Nanos

**Jordan Nanos** (0:04)
Hello, everyone, welcome back to SemiAnalysis Weekly. I'm here this week with the Data Center, Energy and Industrials team. That's Jeremie, Ellie and Reyk. We're going to talk about a couple of articles they put out recently. The first is, stop saying half of 2026 US Data Center capacity is canceled. Nice title, we'll clarify some stuff there. And the second one-
Pretty descriptive, yeah. The second one is about behind the meter data center power generation, 40 gigawatts by 2028 Guys, welcome to the show.

**Reyk Knuhtsen** (0:39)
Thank you, Jordan. Yeah, thanks for having us.

**Jordan Nanos** (0:44)
We're covering three continents on this one. We got Reyk in Singapore.

**Reyk Knuhtsen** (0:48)
The latency.

**Jordan Nanos** (0:51)
We'll try not to.

**Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros** (0:52)
It never sets on SemiAnalysis, bro.

**Jordan Nanos** (0:56)
Normal day, yeah.
Okay, so let's dig in. The first article had a great title, and obviously, the conclusion didn't bury the lead at all. But I've been seeing this all over the media, where everybody keeps saying that half of data center capacity is canceled. You guys walked through maybe reasons why people are saying this, and then clarified some stuff as to like, what's actually happening. Can you give a lay of the land as to what's reality, what's fake?

**Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros** (1:28)
Yeah, I can start with the why.
I think Bloomberg started this, right, with this big headline of like half of US data center capacity is delayed. Everyone else started piling in and citing the same number. And most of these articles point to the same underlying source, right, which is a report that's available out there. And when you look at the report, the report says there was 12 gigawatt of data center capacity scheduled to go online at the US in 2026, and only five is under construction. Right?
For us, when we saw this, we were like, no, why is everyone talking about this? Like, it's just not possible. And, you know, I think the funny thing is that, like, you don't even need to, like, do anything fancy. You can just disprove this data so easily. Like, I don't know, man. Amazon announced publicly they've built 4GW in 2025 Is that going up or not in 2026? Obviously, it's going up.
Amazon alone is probably going to add, like, you know, 5GW plus, so that's basically all they think is going to be going live, like one company. You know, obviously, you had all the hyperskaters. CoreWeave, you know, is going to add a gigawatt in 2026 All of that is under construction. So, you're telling me CoreWeave is going to get one of the construction is like, you know, a fifth of the market, like, come on, there's a massive issue in the denominator. I think you're just wrong. Just don't publish that. So, yeah, that's a high level take, Reyk, if you want to add more deeds. But for me, I think that's the, that was the trigger. Just looking at the underlying source, you're like, oh, guys, you're just off. It's just wrong.

**Reyk Knuhtsen** (3:16)
Yeah, we had seen this getting paraded around quite a bit.
I mean, everybody would go viral, just kind of reposting it. It was like, my God, this is mind-numbing to see every time on my Twitter timeline. Obviously, our clients are pretty smart. Our clients are going to take every data source they can and compare them against each other. So we also had to help every client on that front. It was like, well, why don't we just write a newsletter about this and say, this is just really fake. We don't have to really go into this as much anymore. Please just read the newsletter. A lot of the baseline here is not worth really talking about sometimes.
So that's why we ended up writing it.

**Jordan Nanos** (4:00)
Yeah. In addition to that, it's not even like the spirit of the article was fake in a sense.
You can imagine or you can forgive somebody getting exact numbers wrong. But if I look at this chart that you guys put out around how the outlook that you guys have forecasted from roughly the last year like April of last year to May of this year, it hasn't even changed by 5 percent. I'll put this chart up on screen. So maybe you can talk through a little bit about what the reality of some of these forecasts are, which is that some stuff gets delayed, but there's very few cancellations that are actually showing up in the market, right?

**Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros** (4:47)
Well, I would disagree. I think there's a pretty substantial amount of cancellations. Just what we keep saying is that these cancellations are early-state projects, right? I'm not sure if you have this one on the screen, but like there is this map of the US where we show like the large load requests, right? We're just like slightly different but kind of goes to the same point. As of today, you have over a terawatt of data center load that is requested by operators in the US alone, right? This chart is as of six months ago. It's more than doubled now.