The five words used for capacity, never traded for one another. The buildout is reported in announcements, and these words count it in electrons. The Introduction.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
The book uses this term in a sense of its own.
Where the record uses it
- Campus PORTS-Pike
- Campus Fairwater Wisconsin
- Campus Fairwater Atlanta
- Campus Helios
- Campus Z.ai domestic-chip campus
- Scorecard indicator Largest evidenced operating site
- Scorecard indicator Headline nuclear restarts delivering
- Scorecard indicator Hyperscalers’ Q1 operating cash flow (OCF) / cash capex
- Scorecard indicator Microsoft Jun. quarter
- Scorecard indicator OpenAI + Anthropic annualized revenue
- Dated test Chapter 12, claim 5, the hyperscalers’ own borrowing, due 31 December 2027
- Dated test Chapter 6, firm service is the constraint, due 31 December 2028
Sources that use it
- Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025), read in full (the “engineering state” vs “lawyerly society” frame; the US offshore-wind ledger Wang dates to 2024, which its source, the Department of Energy’s Offshore Wind Market Report 2023 Edition, dates to 31 May 2023 — 42 MW operating, 932 under construction, 20,978 in permitting review; Cape Wind’s sixteen years of litigation; the only US nuclear plant built this century, “fifteen years and $30 billion”, the expected cost of the eleven reactors China’s nuclear authority approved in August 2024, ch. 2, p. 30, his note citing Bloomberg of 20 August 2024; the nuclear-powered Meta data center halted by a rare species of bee near the site, ch. 6, p. 203, his note citing the Financial Times of 4 November 2024; China’s 76 GW of wind installed in 2023 to America’s six; “the United States brought lawyers to a technology fight” and “rather than realizing its own Sputnik moment, the United States triggered one in China”; Nicholas Bagley’s “The Procedure Fetish” as Wang quotes it, Bagley’s word “available” dropped from “ventilate every available option” and his hypothetical extreme of a spectrum given as what the federal process requires; the book quotes Bagley’s own text from the article’s row; technology as tools, blueprints and process knowledge, the last existing “mostly in people’s heads” and embodied by an experienced workforce, ch. 3, with the NNSA’s $69 million relearning of Fogbank as the American cautionary tale, p. 74; the munitions asymmetry — nearly 1,800 commercial ships under construction in China to five in the United States in 2022, ch. 6, p. 204, his note citing the Congressional Research Service’s report on U.S. commercial shipbuilding of 15 November 2023, and UNIDO’s 45 percent of world industrial capacity by 2030, pp. 204–206, a forecast his notes do not source — and “algorithms alone will never win a battle”; “The United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and all other high-income states combined add up to 38 percent of capacity”, the sentence after the UNIDO forecast; “In two days, Ukraine could fire as many shells as the United States makes in a month”, p. 204, his note giving about 7,000 Ukrainian shells a day against 14,400 American shells a month from the New York Times of 29 May 2024 and Bloomberg of 7 June 2024; the Introduction: “For six years, I lived through a period of economic dynamism that gave way to smothering political repressiveness … I tracked the expanding web of US restrictions on Chinese tech companies, as well as their struggle to escape from American restraints”; the question closing the paragraph before the shipbuilding figures, ch. 6: “Which would you rather have: software or hardware?”; the full text read carries no page breaks, and the pages given are those its endnotes print for each noted passage; on Cape Wind, ch. 2: “the lawyerly society is great at protecting the wealthy”; on the controls: “scorched China’s most dynamic companies without killing them” (ch. 6, Fortress China); ch. 2: by 2025 China had caught up with the United States in the number of nuclear plants, fifty-five to fifty-four, with thirty-one under construction against America’s one; ch. 6: “American companies are not so much constrained on computing power as they are on electrical power” and “what China lacks in technological sophistication, it might make up for in electrical power”; ch. 6: “They ignored Beijing’s beseeching to buy from domestic vendors for the simple reason that Chinese technologies were not good enough”; ch. 6: “In 2024, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization forecast that China will have 45 percent of the world’s industrial capacity by 2030”). In the Sources
- AEP Ohio, “New process advances 5.6 GW of data center projects,” 13 February 2026 (the page’s own title is “AEP Ohio Updates PUCO on Data Center Load: Figures Show Tariff is Working”; its figures as of 12 February 2026: of about 30,000 MW requested before the tariff, “13,022.7 MW asked and paid for a study,” 5,642 MW signed after the tariff took effect beside “12,219 MW of data center contracts signed before the tariff went into effect,” 17,861 MW in all “scheduled to come online progressively through 2035”) In the Sources
- Alphabet, “Alphabet Announces Agreement to Acquire Intersect to Advance U.S. Energy Innovation,” news release, 22 December 2025 (the agreement to buy Intersect, a developer of datacenter and power sites, for $4.75 billion in cash and assumed debt; “for $4.75 billion in cash, plus the assumption of debt”; “multiple gigawatts of energy and data center projects in development, or under construction, from its successful existing partnership with Google”; Intersect works “by co-locating industrial demand with dedicated gas and renewable power generation”; the companies’ “first announced co-located data center and power site, under construction in Haskell County, Texas”). In the Sources
- Amazon.com, “Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Results,” 30 July 2026 (trailing twelve-month free cash flow −$7.6 billion; purchases of property and equipment $54.2 billion in the quarter; employees, full-time and part-time, excluding contractors and temporary personnel, by quarter Q1 2025 to Q2 2026: 1,560,000, 1,546,000, 1,578,000, 1,576,000, 1,575,000, 1,595,000 — read in the 8-K Exhibit 99.1 of 30 July 2026; “Operating cash flow increased 33% to $161.4 billion for the trailing twelve months”; the income statement in the release, quarter ended 30 June 2026 against 2025, in millions: operating income $27,461 against $19,171, other income (expense), net $53,415 against $1,117, total non-operating income $53,396 against $1,686, income before income taxes $80,857 against $20,857, net income $62,647 against $18,164; “Net income increased to $62.6 billion in the second quarter, or $5.75 per diluted share, compared with $18.2 billion, or $1.68 per diluted share, in second quarter 2025.”; “Second quarter 2026 net income includes non-operating pre-tax other income of $53.4 billion, primarily from our investments in Anthropic.”). In the Sources
- American Electric Power, “AEP Reports Second-Quarter 2026 Earnings,” company release, 30 July 2026 (the company “added an incremental six GW of signed load agreements during the second quarter, primarily in Texas, bringing total contracted load growth through 2030 to 69 GW” — the figure is contracted load THROUGH 2030, the filing’s own qualifier; also filed as Exhibit 99.1 to AEP’s Form 8-K of 30 July 2026; the turbines are “approximately 13 GW” of gas-fired turbine capacity “for potential deployment through 2031”, the release’s own qualifier, with “up to 10 GW of additional turbine capacity through 2035” under evaluation). In the Sources
And 162 more: search the Sources.
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Operating, under construction, contracted, proposed, requested.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/operating-under-construction-contracted-proposed-requested (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-operating-under-construction-contracted--2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Operating, under construction, contracted, proposed, requested}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/operating-under-construction-contracted-proposed-requested},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}