The AI Buildout Has a Physical Speed Limit

Most of the AI timeline debate happens in software. Benchmark scores, model releases, the shape of the capability curve. Jon Billow watches a different number for a living: lead times.Billow is on the leadership team at BNS, a firm that manufactures and installs electrical and communication infrastructure. The same critical power equipment his teams put into data centers also goes onto Navy and Coast Guard ships, more than 150 of them. He emailed John Sherman because he thinks the people forecasting AI’s arrival are missing what he sees on the construction side every week. The buildout can only move as fast as its slowest part, and right now almost every part is backed up for years.That email is what got him on the show. Here is the heart of what he laid out.The constraint nobody prices inTo bring a large data center online, Billow says, a long list of things has to land at the same time: permitting, grid interconnect, critical power, cooling, and the compute itself. Miss one and the whole project waits. And nearly every item on that list carries a backlog measured in many months, sometimes years.The pinch point he keeps returning to is critical power equipment. According to Billow, the orders all funnel back to roughly five manufacturers, Eaton, ABB, Schneider, GE Vernova among them, and all of them are slammed. He notes that even the US government is having a hard time getting its allocation for ship programs, because it is standing in the same line as every hyperscaler. On top of that, more municipalities are now requiring data centers to bring their own behind-the-meter power generation, which adds another category of equipment backlog and a skill most operators have never needed before. Hooking up to the grid is one thing. Building gas turbines and finding electricians who can parallel generators is another, and the skilled trades are already stretched thin.A factor of five to sevenSherman pushed him to put a number on the gap. If a company says a project lands in a year, how far off is that really?Billow’s read: the US has roughly 50 gigawatts of total data center capacity today, with about a quarter of it allocated to AI. Around five gigawatts are under active construction and another seven to twelve sit in backlog. Set that against the order-of-magnitude jumps the labs are talking about and his estimate is blunt. “If I was to be a betting man I would say it’s in the order of five to seven years.” Whatever timeline you have been handed, in other words, multiply it.The tells from inside the labsHe pointed to two recent signals that the infrastructure is already the limiting factor. OpenAI walking back a large commitment tied to its Sora video product, which Billow reads as a company looking at finite compute and deciding where to spend it. And Anthropic delaying a model, which he attributes partly to security concerns and partly to the reality of constrained compute capacity. The software keeps leapfrogging. The ground underneath it does not move at the same speed.Why this could be good newsBillow does not frame any of this as a reason to relax. He frames it as time. If the physical buildout runs years behind the hype, that is runway to get governance and alignment right rather than scrambling after the fact. He drew the parallel Sherman’s audience knows well, comparing the moment to how the world slowly built doctrine around nuclear risk, and argued the work now is to use the delay deliberately.His closing image stuck with us. He said he wants to tell his grandkids that we were building the car while it was going down the road at 55 miles an hour, but we had the presence of mind to put in seat belts because we knew who was in the back seat.Where they did not agreeThe conversation did not paper over the tension. Sherman described his time in Holly Ridge, Louisiana, a town of about 2,000 mostly elderly people living next to a data center he compared to the size of Manhattan, with construction dust in the air and water residents will not drink. He found it overwhelmingly sad. Billow sees the same structures differently, as a testament to human ingenuity that can be sited and built responsibly if we choose to. Both things sat in the room at once, and the episode is better for letting them.Going deeperWe pulled the headline argument into this piece. The full breakdown for paid subscribers goes into the parts that get more technical and more political:* Compute governance as the most feasible near-term guardrail, including chip tracking and why the industry pushes back hard* The anonymous-compute problem and why “confidential computing” worries safety researchers* China’s narrow-AI approach and what it implies about the data center race* Recursive self-improvement, Jevons paradox, and whether you even need new data centers to reach the danger zone* The regulatory carve-out tech enjoys, and the NDA story coming out of LouisianaIf you want that version, upgrade your subscription and it lands in your inbox. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theairisknetwork.substack.com/subscribe