Cassidy: Amazon hit the power wall.
Cassidy: Now it's about what it’s willing to build—and burn through—to get around it.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Amazon’s spending surge has a specific bottleneck, while a Texas project raises a much bigger question: who gets to approve the fix?
Bill: If today's show was useful, follow us wherever you're listening — the next one will be waiting.
Cassidy: South China Morning Post writes:
Quote: Amazon has confirmed it is financing a massive
Quote: private gas power plant in Texas that could become the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
Quote: It is the latest example of tech giants going off the grid to get their AI operations online faster.
Quote: The news was first reported by market intelligence company Cleanview
Quote: which reviewed satellite imagery to connect three data centre construction permits filed this week by Amazon to the gas plant
Quote: which is being developed by Pacifico Energy and is known as GW Ranch.
Bill: Seven-point-six-five gigawatts at one Texas site.
Bill: Amazon is financing generation on the scale of a utility because apparently waiting for somebody else's power plan wasn't an option.
Cassidy: And Cleanview pieced it together through satellite imagery and permit records—not an Amazon announcement.
Cassidy: It linked Amazon's three data-center permits to Pacifico Energy's GW Ranch.
Cassidy: For a project this large, that’s a pretty bleak transparency standard.
Bill: Thirty-five turbines, permitted for more than 30 million metric tonnes of emissions a year.
Bill: Put the permit approval next to Amazon's sustainability accounting, because this is way past a cute cloud-computing footnote.
Cassidy: Exactly. Even as a private project, GW Ranch’s emissions ceiling would top every other source in the country.
Cassidy: Amazon can call it data-center infrastructure; regulators should give it the scrutiny a power project that size demands.
Cassidy: Here's Merin Rebecca Thomas at IBTimes:
Quote: Amazon expects to spend about $220 billion in capital expenditures in 2026
Quote: up from its previous estimate of around $200 billion
Quote: as rising costs for artificial intelligence memory chips drive higher infrastructure spending.
Quote: Speaking during the company's second-quarter earnings call
Quote: CEO Andy Jassy said the rising cost of memory has become a major factor in Amazon's infrastructure spending as the company races to expand
Quote: capacity for artificial intelligence workloads
Quote: Yahoo Finance reported.
Cassidy: We just covered Texas.
Cassidy: Now Andy Jassy says the extra $20 billion in 2026 capex is coming from memory costs.
Cassidy: Amazon has two ceilings at once: getting electrons, and getting enough high-bandwidth memory to turn them into useful compute.
Bill: Memory just moved the biggest infrastructure budget on Earth by ten percent.
Bill: People obsess over GPU allocations
Bill: but a rack full of accelerators without the memory configuration your workload needs is a very expensive space heater.
Cassidy: Jassy says $220 billion still won’t cover 2026 demand.
Cassidy: He says 2027 will be tight
Cassidy: and 2028 demand is already “striking.” That’s a serious demand signal
Cassidy: but Amazon also needs to separate what customers are truly consuming from what it’s reserving for its own AI operation.
Bill: The cloud bill is about to include a bottleneck tax for everything at once: power, chips, memory, networking.
Bill: A model can get marginally better and still lose the deployment if its memory footprint blows up latency and cost.
Cassidy: Kim Ji-young, writing in Seoul Economic Daily:
Quote: VESSL AI a company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure
Quote: said on the 7th that it has secured more than 1,000 Nvidia Blackwell (B200) graphics processing units (GPUs).
Quote: The company plans to supply the high-performance GPU infrastructure
Quote: obtained through cooperation with SK Telecom
Quote: to customers via its flagship service "VESSL Cloud."
Bill: A thousand B200s through SK Telecom is a meaningful new supply route.
Bill: Telcos are becoming GPU brokers, giving a company like VESSL a way into Blackwell without waiting for a hyperscaler to leave crumbs.
Cassidy: And VESSL already has Upstage and Motif Technologies on its customer list, alongside U.S.
Cassidy: startups. The fleet is going into VESSL Cloud as on-demand, spot, and reserved capacity.
Bill: “AI factory” is still one of those phrases that makes my eye twitch.
Bill: But if VESSL can keep B200 capacity available at a price founders can stomach, the branding won’t matter much.
Bill: The useful signal is Blackwell supply reaching Korean infrastructure players in four-digit batches.
Cassidy: That sits awkwardly next to Andy Jassy saying memory costs alone added $20 billion to Amazon’s capex.
Cassidy: GPUs are getting easier to route; the rest of the stack keeps finding fresh ways to get expensive.
Bill: Why are AI companies suddenly so concerned with gas plants, grid connections, and data-center power?
Bill: Aren’t faster chips and better models still the main bottlenecks?
Cassidy: They’re still bottlenecks, but none of it matters if the physical infrastructure underneath can’t get electricity when it needs it.
Cassidy: Reuters’ Ron Bousso reports that Microsoft
Cassidy: Amazon Alphabet and Meta have announced plans to spend more than $600 billion on AI in 2026
Cassidy: while U.S. grids are struggling to keep pace with hyperscaler demand.
Cassidy: So the spending now reaches beyond servers.
Cassidy: Companies need sites and grid connections, and sometimes dependable generation close by.
Cassidy: RMI says data centers and other large new users can struggle to secure enough power quickly
Cassidy: delaying facilities or pushing them toward expensive
Cassidy: polluting backup systems.
Cassidy: TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant also reports a scramble for natural-gas supplies and equipment as companies race to lock down data-center power.
Cassidy: The clearest warning sign is in PJM: Wharton’s Santiago Gallino writes that the grid operator fell nearly 6,600 megawatts short of its
Cassidy: reserve target for summer 2027
Cassidy: with data centers accounting for 94% of projected load growth.
Bill: So is power actually becoming the limiting factor for AI
Bill: or are companies just buying every scarce input because they’re afraid of being left behind?
Cassidy: Both are happening.
Cassidy: Models, chips, land, and construction capacity still matter, but a completed data center can sit idle if power isn’t available on schedule.
Cassidy: Watch whether grid interconnection delays, reserve shortfalls, and new power deals keep determining where AI capacity gets built.
Cassidy: If they do, electricity is a practical near-term constraint on AI expansion.
Cassidy: Want to go deeper on the infrastructure behind AI?
Cassidy: Check out The Data Center Daily
Cassidy: a daily briefing on AI compute
Cassidy: hyperscaler capex the power grid
Cassidy: semiconductor supply
Cassidy: and energy markets reshaped by intelligence at scale.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: Every story is linked in the show notes if you want to dig deeper.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.