Marc Ganzi, CEO of DigitalBridge, has warned that data centers will run out of power in the next two years
In the company’s Q1 2024 earnings conference call, Marc Ganzi said: “We’re kind of running out of power in the next 18 to 24 months.”
Ganzi had previously addressed the struggle for power at the Berlin Infrastructure Conference in 2022, where he said power for data centers would run out in five years.
Ganzi added: “If you think about how much power remains on the US grid, we’re down to less than 7GW on the US grid, we’re probably down to less than 2.8 to 3GW in Europe.”
The problem with power are around transmission and distribution, rather than power generation, Ganzi suggested.
He said: “It’s power transmission and distribution that are constrained. Transmission grids are capacity challenged. And imagine, if you think it’s hard to get a new cell tower permitted, think about building new transmission towers or substations.”
DigitalBridge said at the end of Q4 last year it had a pipeline supply of more than 5GW, and Ganzi added the company has 2GW of IT capacity currently in development.
At $10 million per megawatt, the company anticipates more than $20 billion in capital expenditure in the upcoming years.
He added that DigitalBridge plans to build over 3GW of IT capacity in partnership with Silver Lake to meet the growing demand for AI and cloud infrastructure.
Ganzi said previously that generative AI is a 38GW opportunity, equating to hundreds of billions of dollars for data center, fiber, and tower providers.
The company plans to train low-latency AI models using data centers close to existing power generation, such as wind, hydro, solar, natural gas, and wind.
Switch, one of DigitalBridge’s data center companies, is mostly using electricity generated by wind and solar. Another of the company’s data centers in Brazil is using hydropower.
Ganzi added that AI is “actually part of the solution” and will be deployed to see how DigitalBridge data centers can operate more efficiently.
US-based DigitalBridge manages, owns, and invests in digital infrastructure across the world. Its footprint includes more than 60 data centers, 20 interconnection hubs spanning 30 markets, and a modular Edge data center platform.
