The Future Power Bottleneck in the Development and Deployment of AI – Another Catalyst for Market Woes?
The pressure on ROIs (return on investments) in AI is acute and large by nature. When CoreWeave’s $9.9 billion AI data centre out in Texas faced a 2 month construction delay in mid 2025, around $14 billion was wiped from its market cap in five weeks. For context this site – although consuming enough continuous power to run a small city (260MW capacity) – was one in a portfolio of 41 sites. There is much debate around whether the sell-off was also driven by belated reporting by CoreWeave – having not admitted the delay earlier – or potentially concerns around honesty in scale of the problem and cause. Thunderstorms were in part to blame according to CoreWeave – “delay in concrete pouring” - but weather reports show that there were only three days of thunderstorms at the site between June and September. Perhaps the cause of delay was something more sinister for investors like technical issues or money problems. Either way, the CoreWe...