Despite the fact that what @elonmusk says is true, every single "guppy" datacenter project will continue on until their current money runs out. Well paid lemmings continuing towards the cliff. The fact that everyone involved already knows it will never operate doesn't matter. In another life, decades ago, I did the legal side of structured finance work and I saw how this played out in the dot com era first hand (yes, I'm that old). Someone raises the money and structures the financing in traunches and mezzanines using all these big beautiful words that make it sound like the investors are buying something complex and amazing when in reality they are at most getting the leftovers of a project that is already over mortgaged. The finance guys get paid for raising it (fees, promote, equity that can be sold). Their job is done once the capital is committed and they don't care what happens after. They don’t need the building to open, make money, or even finish. Then the builders get the contract. They get paid for pouring concrete, erecting steel, and installing equipment until accounts run dry. Their incentive is to keep the site busy and billable, not to ask whether the finished product will ever have power, customers, or a reason to exist. Stopping early just means less work. Everyone else, lenders, equipment vendors, local officials chasing tax breaks, has their own narrow piece and that's all they care about. Nobody above is paid to get the whole thing working. None of it is contingent upon opening. When the money starts to run out and the economics stop making sense, they keep building anyway. They just keep spending what’s left until it’s gone as anything left just goes back to investors, the sophisticated of whom have already hedged this bet anyway and the unsophisticated, well, nobody cares. The result is exactly what you’d expect: half-built shells sitting in fields, no longer useful to anyone who got paid along the way, and now someone else’s problem. No funds to complete. Too big to use for anything else. Zero money available to tear down and return to farm ground. Our present world of compartmentalization, where nobody is responsible for the whole, makes it rational for every participant to ignore the outcome. That’s why these things keep getting built even when they’re already doomed.