Datacenter delivery and supply-chain ledger
As of: 2026-08-26. Tracker: #9304. This ledger treats an AI datacenter as a multi-stage industrial system. A GPU purchase or gigawatt announcement becomes useful capacity only after every binding input is delivered, integrated, commissioned, healthy, scheduled, and matched to a real workload.
Capacity attrition and cancellation (#9363)
Intel’s July 2025 disclosure types Germany and Poland as discontinued planned projects and Ohio as slowed construction, not cancellation. The 25-project opposition-linked cohort and named Google withdrawal further show why investment, permitting, construction, commissioning, and live output require separate survival states. None alone measures lost qualified wafers, shipped accelerators, or operating IT MW.
Named grid and large-load commitments (#9364)
| Record | Typed state | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| FERC Susquehanna | 300-to-480 MW amended co-location agreement rejected without prejudice | Permanent denial, shutdown, or lost live IT MW. |
| AEP Ohio DCT | >25 MW class; up to 12 years; collateral and generally 85% minimum billing floor | Energization, actual draw, or utilization. |
| Dominion GS-5 | >=25 MW and >=75% load factor class; 14 years; $1.5M/MW collateral; 85%/85%/60% minimum charges | Queue completion or one named project’s operation. |
| Meta Laidley / Entergy | 2,262 MW generation and 500-kV transmission path approved for a named project | Completed construction, delivered energy, or compute MW. |
Component delivery receipts (#9365)
| Component | Strongest disclosed state | Missing downstream proof |
|---|---|---|
| Micron HBM3E | 24 GB 8-high volume production; named H200 shipment timing | Stack units, yield, allocation, installed H200s. |
| Micron HBM4 | High-volume shipments for customer platforms | Bit volume, units, customer split, system acceptance. |
| Broadcom Tomahawk 6 | 102.4 Tbps / 200G-SerDes production-volume silicon shipments | Switch systems, optics, cables, deployed fabric goodput. |
| TSMC CoWoS-L | In production and customer qualification | Good-package output, qualified designs/customers, accelerator shipments. |
| TSMC Arizona N4 | High-volume production with company-reported comparable yield | Wafer starts, actual yield, product mix, good dies, AI allocation. |
Capacity lifecycle
| State | Minimum evidence |
|---|---|
| Announced / intended | Public plan with actor, location or scope, and date. |
| Optioned / reserved | Land, components, generation, or capacity rights held but not fully contracted. |
| Contracted | Binding purchase, lease, utility, generation, or customer agreement, with conditions. |
| Permitted / interconnected | Material land-use, environmental, grid/interconnection, and construction approvals. |
| Under construction | Site and infrastructure work has begun; supply and completion risk remain. |
| Powered | Electricity and cooling can support the stated IT load under operating constraints. |
| Installed | Hardware is physically present; integration, firmware, network, and acceptance remain. |
| Accepted | System passes customer/operator acceptance and availability tests. |
| Healthy / schedulable | Capacity is visible to the control plane and not reserved, failed, or degraded. |
| Active | Workloads are running; utilization and SLO may still be poor. |
| Useful goodput | Quality-constrained work is completed within SLO after failures, retries, and overhead. |
Any aggregate “GW,” “GPUs,” or “capacity” figure must name its state and boundary.
Power, grid, and generation
- Grid connection: the IEA estimates grid constraints could delay about 20% of globally planned datacenter capacity through 2030. Interconnection queues, transmission upgrades, substation buildout, and utility planning can dominate chip delivery.
- Demand growth: the IEA reported datacenter electricity consumption rising 17% in 2025, from roughly 485 TWh in 2025 toward about 950 TWh in 2030 in its outlook.
- Firm generation: public projects increasingly pair datacenters with gas generation, nuclear uprates/new builds, batteries, geothermal, fuel cells, or behind-the-meter systems. Nameplate generation is not guaranteed delivered IT power; fuel, outages, transmission, emissions, and permitting remain.
- Demand response: Google disclosed shifting or reducing machine-learning load during grid events, evidence that deadline and mobility classes can convert some compute into a grid resource.
- Power electronics: AI load density and rapid current transients are pushing interest in higher-voltage DC distribution, medium-voltage solid-state transformers, and rack/platform co-design. These remain emerging architectures, not universal deployed defaults.
- Ratepayer allocation: Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and local reporting increasingly address who pays for generation, substations, and transmission. Social license depends on the answer.
Required power fields
Utility/region, interconnection request and queue date, contracted MW, expected phase dates, firm vs interruptible supply, generation type, redundancy, storage, transmission/substation scope, upgrade payer, tariff, demand-response rights, metered IT and facility load, PUE, outage and curtailment history, and uncertainty.
Cooling, water, and heat rejection
- Liquid cooling is now a platform assumption for many rack-scale AI systems, but “liquid cooled” can mean direct-to-chip loops, rear-door heat exchangers, immersion, or hybrid paths.
- Closed-loop language does not mean zero water use: heat rejection, humidification, electricity generation, construction, and maintenance can create direct or indirect water demand.
- The IEA places cooling near 7% of efficient hyperscale electricity use but above 30% in some less-efficient enterprise facilities; climate, load, and design change the ratio.
- Public water disclosure remains weak and inconsistent. Report source water, consumptive use, withdrawals, recycling, discharge, seasonality, drought restrictions, WUE, and boundary.
- Rack density affects coolant distribution units, pumps, piping, serviceability, leak domains, heat exchangers, chillers/dry coolers, and recovery after failure—not only nominal capacity.
Electrical and construction equipment
The long-lead bill of materials includes transformers, switchgear, breakers, busways, UPS, generators/turbines, batteries, substations, transmission equipment, chillers, pumps, cooling units, racks, cabling, fire suppression, and controls. OpenAI’s domestic-manufacturing RFP and reported project delays are evidence that broad industrial capacity, not just semiconductors, sets delivery time.
Record vendor, factory/region, order date, promised and actual delivery, capacity rights, qualification/acceptance, substitutions, cancellation terms, and single-source exposure.
HBM, semiconductors, and advanced packaging
- Accelerator supply depends on foundry wafers, HBM stacks, silicon interposers, substrates, advanced packaging such as CoWoS, testing, and board/system integration.
- Normalized “H100-equivalent” counts erase physical SKU, memory, network, power, and delivery differences. Keep physical inventory and normalization methodology separate.
- Memory capacity/bandwidth can bind training, long context, KV cache, and decode independently of nominal FLOPS.
- A reported August 2026 rumor claimed NVIDIA warned major customers of >15% AI-server price
increases due to memory pressure. It remains explicitly unconfirmed in
index.json; use it as a sensitivity scenario, not a fact.
Required fields: accelerator/CPU/NIC/HBM SKU and revision, quantity by lifecycle state, foundry, packaging, HBM capacity/bandwidth, board/system integrator, yield/acceptance, firmware/software, price boundary, order/delivery, and substitutions.
Networking and optics
- Rack-scale systems use scale-up fabrics while pods/sites use scale-out Ethernet/RoCE, InfiniBand, or proprietary interconnect. MoE collectives, disaggregation, checkpointing, and storage traffic create different bottlenecks.
- NVIDIA’s 2026 $2B investments in both Lumentum and Coherent plus multibillion-dollar purchase commitments are direct evidence that lasers, optical components, packaging, and domestic manufacturing capacity are strategic supply inputs.
- Financial Times reporting described pressure across fiber, lasers, and indium-phosphide substrates as the field moves toward co-packaged optics.
- Peak link bandwidth is not collective goodput. Record topology, oversubscription, congestion, cable/optics failures, retransmission, collectives, tail latency, and serviceability.
Storage and data movement
Training checkpoints, datasets, model weights, container images, observability, and inference KV state compete for network and storage bandwidth. Emerging systems such as multi-tier KV stores, Mooncake/3FS-style disaggregation, and cache offload move inference state beyond local HBM.
Record bytes and objects by phase, read/write amplification, checkpoint interval, recovery time, cache tiers, transfer/recompute choice, consistency, encryption, region, failure domain, and shared-network interference.
Land, permitting, labor, and community
- Local opposition now affects elections and state/local rules around electricity prices, pollution, tax incentives, land, noise, water, and generation.
- Data Center Watch estimates $64B of U.S. projects blocked or delayed by opposition, but its advocacy methodology requires project-level verification.
- A widely repeated report that 30–50% of planned 2026 U.S. AI datacenters could be delayed or canceled was challenged by SemiAnalysis as a denominator/state-conflation error. Keep both the claim and rebuttal; never quote one percentage without the underlying project roster.
- Skilled electrical, mechanical, construction, commissioning, and operations labor can gate delivery. Public “jobs created” claims do not establish staffing availability or retention.
Required fields: parcel/site, zoning, permits, environmental review, appeals/litigation, tax and rate agreements, water/noise/emissions commitments, workforce, construction state, community benefits/costs, opposition, and decision dates.
Contradiction case: “half of 2026 capacity delayed”
| Claim | Counterevidence | Correct treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Secondary reporting citing Bloomberg said 30–50% of planned 2026 U.S. projects might be delayed/canceled due to power and electrical shortages. | SemiAnalysis argued the headline conflated project states and traced repetition to one framing rather than a common project denominator. | Retain both sources. Build a named project roster with original expected date, current state, MW boundary, reason, and confidence before computing a percentage. |
This case is the template for all market totals: identify the denominator, capacity state, geography, original event date, and whether later articles are independent evidence.
Delivery-risk register
| Risk | Leading indicator | Falsifiable witness |
|---|---|---|
| Power interconnection delay | Queue position, study milestones, utility construction | Energization and metered delivery date |
| Generation delay | Permits, equipment order, fuel/interconnect | Commercial operation and firm available MW |
| Transformer/switchgear shortage | Factory slot and promised ship date | Accepted equipment on site |
| Cooling/water constraint | Design PUE/WUE, permits, drought rules | Full-load thermal test and operating consumption |
| HBM/packaging constraint | supplier allocation, wafer/package starts | Accepted accelerator systems by SKU |
| Optics/network constraint | laser/substrate/transceiver allocation | Fabric acceptance and sustained collective goodput |
| Construction/labor delay | milestone slip, contractor staffing | Commissioned phase against baseline schedule |
| Community/permitting block | hearing, appeal, ballot, litigation | final permits and unresolved-condition closure |
| Customer/finance risk | take-or-pay, credit, funding, concentration | paid capacity and sustained utilization |
| Software/RAS failure | burn-in, incident, unhealthy node rate | healthy/schedulable fraction and interruption-adjusted goodput |
Outstanding evidence gaps
- Project-level U.S. and global site census with lifecycle, MW boundary, original/current dates, grid/interconnect status, and delivery confidence.
- Utility interconnection queues and tariff/ratepayer agreements joined to named AI sites.
- Transformer, turbine, switchgear, cooling, HBM, packaging, optics, and construction capacity ledgers by vendor/factory and committed delivery.
- Metered PUE/WUE, installed-to-healthy conversion, failure/interruption, and cluster goodput.
- China, Middle East, India, and Europe supply chains and export-control substitutions.
- Cancellation/refutation history instead of announcement-only accumulation.
Named vendor and site lifecycle additions
| Evidence date | Entity / system | Observed lifecycle state | Quantified evidence | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-02-11 | Vertiv power and thermal infrastructure | Supplier backlog / ordered | Q4 organic orders +252%; ~2.9× book-to-bill; $15.0B backlog, +109% YoY. | Product mix, shipment date, site installation, commissioning, or online MW. |
| 2026-07-29 | SK hynix HBM4 | Mass shipments begun | Supplier says HBM4 mass shipments started in Q2 2026. | Units, yield, customer allocation, accelerator integration, or accepted systems. |
| 2026-06-18 | SK hynix 12-layer HBM4E | Customer samples / qualification | Up to 16 Gbps/pin; >20% claimed power-efficiency gain; 17% claimed heat-resistance reduction. | Qualification success, mass-production timing, yield, or fleet availability. |
| 2026-04-23 | TSMC CoWoS | 5.5-reticle production; larger package roadmap | 14-reticle package with ~10 compute dies and 20 HBM stacks planned for 2028. | Wafer-equivalent capacity, yield, allocation, shipment volume, or delivered accelerators. |
| 2025-07-22 | GE Vernova / Crusoe onsite generation | Ordered | 29 turbine packages, expected nearly 1 GW nameplate; 19 booked June 2025 after 10 in December 2024. | Delivery/commissioning, continuous output, IT load, PUE, fuel, emissions permits, or compute acceptance. |
| 2026 case study | Start Campus Sines / Siemens Energy | Phase 1 equipment delivered for early operations; future phases planned | Blue GIS, transformers, and electrical infrastructure in Phase 1; future substations and seawater cooling. | Accepted MW, PUE, water flow, commissioning dates, equipment lead time, or independent uptime. |
Lifecycle joins these rows require
supplier order/backlog
-> factory slot
-> sample/qualification (for semiconductors)
-> shipped
-> site delivered
-> installed
-> commissioned
-> accepted/healthy
-> schedulable
-> active
-> quality-constrained goodput
No row above may skip from backlog, sample, roadmap, or equipment order directly to usable AI capacity.
Power, cooling, and modular-delivery additions
| Evidence date | Entity / system | Observed state | Quantified envelope | Boundary that remains |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-09-18 | Schneider Electric / NVIDIA GB300 reference design | Validated, documented design | 3 clusters; up to 1,152 GPUs; up to 142 kW/rack; liquid-to-liquid CDUs and integrated controls | Blueprint is not built, commissioned, loaded, or production-measured infrastructure. |
| 2026-01-22 | Trane DCDA CDU family | Product launched; first China orders expected Q1 | 400/800/1,350 kW models; custom to 1,700 kW; coordinated control up to 16 units | Expected order delivery is not installed or operating cooling; PUE/space claims are site-dependent. |
| 2026-05-21 | LiquidStack/Trane GigaModular CDU | Commercially available after full-load integration testing and certification | Modular cooling up to 14 MW; early orders | Cooling MW is not IT MW; orders/testing are not shipment, commissioning, uptime, or accepted compute. |
| 2026-07-29 | Johnson Controls | Supplier orders/backlog | $21.0B total backlog, +32%; Americas $15.9B, +40%, supported by datacenter and mission-critical demand | Company backlog spans products/services and non-datacenter work; no direct online-MW conversion. |
Design, product, backlog, and site are different evidence
reference design
-> product validated/certified
-> commercially available
-> ordered/backlog
-> shipped
-> installed
-> commissioned/accepted
-> cooling available at design conditions
-> customer IT installed
-> live critical IT load
-> quality-constrained goodput
Reference designs answer what must fit together. Product releases answer what a vendor offers. Backlog answers what customers have ordered under the supplier’s definition. None alone answers how much AI capacity is operating.
Grid and electrical manufacturing additions
| Evidence date | Supplier / footprint | Observed state | Quantified evidence | Missing delivery join |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-02-12 | Eaton, Jonesville SC | New three-phase transformer factory announced; production expected 2027 | $340M investment; third U.S. three-phase transformer factory | Factory completion, annual unit/MVA output, allocation, shipment, substation install, energization. |
| 2025-09-04 | Hitachi Energy, U.S. | Multi-site manufacturing investment announced | $1B U.S. program; $457M new large-power-transformer factory in South Boston VA | Construction/output date, MVA throughput, yield, orders, allocation, site commissioning. |
| 2026-02-03 | Siemens Energy, U.S. | Brownfield expansion and new factory program announced | $1B across transformers/service, gas turbines, and grid components | Product split, factory start, output, lead-time reduction, shipment, commissioning. |
| 2025-05-14 | GE Vernova T&D India | New manufacturing/testing capacity planned in Chennai and Noida | ~$16M; Electrification backlog reported >3× YoY | Product-specific throughput, domestic/export allocation, shipped/installed equipment, live grid capacity. |
| 2025-03-25 | Schneider Electric, U.S. | Multi-site electrical manufacturing and test-lab investment announced through 2027 | >$700M planned; >1,000 jobs; medium-voltage products, circuit breakers, switchgear, power distribution, and AI-datacenter test labs | Facility-by-facility completion, unit/MVA output, factory slots, customer allocation, shipment, acceptance, energization. |
| 2026-04-08 | Eaton, Bellevue NE | 370,000-square-foot medium-voltage switchgear factory announced; production targeted for H1 2027 | >$30M investment; >200 jobs; air- and gas-insulated switchgear | Qualified production, annual units/ratings, backlog allocation, shipment, site acceptance, live datacenter MW. |
| 2025-10-17 | PJM large-load forecasting | RTO filing documents utility-specific request/verification processes rather than one PJM load-interconnection queue | 32 GW peak growth forecast for 2024-2030, about 30 GW from data centers; disclosed state/utility thresholds include 70 MW, 100 MW, and 25 MW | Customer-level request census, duplicate-screening, financial commitment, probability adjustment, upgrade contract, construction, and energization. |
Large-load request and forecast discipline
PJM’s 2025 filing shows why a “queue MW” headline is not a clean denominator: large-load requests originate with utilities and load-serving entities under different thresholds, validation rules, probability factors, and duplicate-handling practices. Record forecast MW, requested MW, probability-adjusted MW, contracted MW, upgrade-ready MW, energized MW, and metered load separately. A forecast is evidence of planning pressure, not evidence that the datacenter, substation, generation, or transmission upgrade exists.
Cooling and prefabricated delivery additions
| Evidence date | Supplier / footprint | Observed state | Quantified evidence | Missing delivery join |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-11-17 | Modine / Airedale, Franklin WI | 155,000-square-foot cooling factory opened within a four-site U.S. expansion | $100M multi-site program; >300 jobs targeted by March 2026; about 430 employees within three years | Qualified unit/thermal-MW output, yield, backlog allocation, shipment, site acceptance, commissioning, supported live IT MW |
| 2026-05-26 | Modine / Airedale, undisclosed strategic customer | Long-term capacity reservation with upfront customer funding | >$4B of products reserved for 2027-2029; $165M upfront cash | Customer identity, product mix, annual units/thermal MW, factory allocation, shipment, site, commissioning, live load |
| 2025-11-06 | Schneider Electric prefabricated pod | Shipping pre-designed and pre-assembled modular product | Supports high-density pods rated to 1MW+ with liquid-cooling and electrical distribution options | Shipped units, customer/site, accepted rating, assembly/commissioning date, measured thermal performance, live IT MW |
The lifecycle is intentionally asymmetric: an opened factory outranks an investment plan; a capacity reservation outranks a non-binding forecast; a shipping module outranks a reference design. None equals accepted equipment, commissioned cooling, or live critical IT load.
Electrical delivery chain
investment / factory announcement
-> factory construction / line qualification
-> annual product-specific output
-> customer order / backlog
-> testing / shipment
-> site/substation installation
-> utility acceptance / energization
-> continuous deliverable facility power
-> live critical IT load
Transformer MVA, switchgear ratings, HVDC/FACTS equipment, generation MW, facility MW, and critical IT MW remain distinct physical units.
Storage and network delivery additions
| Evidence date | Entity / system | Observed state | Quantified envelope | Missing production join |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-03-12 | VAST / NVIDIA / CoreWeave BlueField architecture | Vendor said testing and first deployment were underway | Claimed 70% VAST-infrastructure footprint/power reduction and >5% net energy savings; target hundreds of thousands of GPUs | Installed prevalence, storage load, DPU resource use, failures, cost, and neutral application goodput. |
| 2026-04-22 | VAST Series F/business scale | Financing and company-reported commercial scale | $30B valuation; ~$1B transaction; >$4B bookings; >$500M CARR; claimed millions-of-GPUs environments | Audited customer/workload mix, storage capacity/traffic, concentration, and platform-to-GPU goodput. |
| 2026-03-16 | WEKA NeuralMesh | General availability | Enterprise storage/memory platform for training, inference, and agents | Shipments/deployments, bytes/IOPS/bandwidth, memory hit, failures, and application goodput. |
| 2026-06-09 | Arista 7060XE7 | Product portfolio announced; availability Q4 2026–Q1 2027 | ~100 Tbps/system; 1.6T ports; air/liquid variants; claimed ~60% LPO power reduction | Shipment, multi-vendor interoperability, field reliability, topology, congestion, and collective goodput. |
| 2026-03-12 | Arista XPO MSA | Specification/MSA plus demonstrations | 12.8 Tbps/module; 204.8 Tbps/OCP RU; 4× density; up to 400 W module cooling | Qualification, yield, shipment, interoperability, field service, and deployed application performance. |
Data-movement lifecycle
architecture / standard
-> reference implementation
-> product announcement / GA
-> qualification and interoperability
-> shipment / deployment
-> workload integration
-> bytes + IOPS + bandwidth + latency + error evidence
-> checkpoint / training / inference / agent goodput
Peak bandwidth, storage bookings, supported-GPU claims, and general availability remain separate from end-to-end data-plane performance.