No, we won't - there's significant capex on all that infra that will have to be paid down, and we won't have datacenters to help pay for it.

+GPUs have significantly shorter useful life spans than say, all the dark fiber laid in the 90s

I'm talking about the Watts used to power the GPUs, not the GPUs themselves.

Call me overly cynical, but I’m willing to bet we’re already footing the bill in more than a few ways.

> No, we won't - there's significant capex on all that infra that will have to be paid down, and we won't have datacenters to help pay for it.

AIUI, OP is saying that, with all these DCs with no load, we'll have excess electricity generation capacity that was built to support these DCs. That's the "cheap power" he is talking about, not necessarily "cheap computational power".

And I’m saying the electricity companies will have excess power, but will also have excess debt to service on infrastructure they now don’t need. They’ll get rate hikes approved to force the remaining ratepayers to pay down the capex.

Also, a bunch of that money they spent will be on transmission infrastructure that is 100% useless if you aren’t moving that amount of power along exactly that route.

No, the public utilities aren't the ones taking the debt to fund the power generation for some direct data centers.

Companies like Bloom Energy are putting up power plants right next to DCs. If datacenter power demand then these companies will sell back to the grid creating an oversupply.

If the debt load is too high they're need to declare bankruptcy, at which point the bond holders will lose their capital, not the public.

Public utilities tend to pass on all their costs to their customers. If the data centers crumble, that just means the remaining customers (business and residential) each will have to pick up a larger share of the debt payments for the buildout.