Musk Warns of Stranded Compute Capacity in Partially Built Data Centers

On Oct. 25, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and founder of xAI, responded to a post on X about chip stockpiling and compute resale, saying that a large amount of compute capacity will be left idle in partially completed data centers. "I think we will see a lot of compute resources sitting idle in not-yet-completed data centers," he wrote.

The post Musk responded to was from Yuchen Jin, a researcher at the University of Washington, who cited a friend working at a compute startup. According to the post, some companies have locked in GPU capacity in advance even if they may not ultimately train leading AI models, and rental prices for H100, B200 and B300 GPUs have risen by 2 to 3 times, allowing those holding the capacity to profit by reselling it.

On data center construction, a JPMorgan analysis from May found that more than 60% of US data centers scheduled for completion by 2027 have not yet broken ground, while about 7% of projects are delayed.