Dams, Capacitors, and Datacenters

I have been reading Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert of late. It is a great book that gets into the history of irrigation and water reclamation projects in the American west. I will reference some of the things discussed in that book here, so if you don’t want spoilers, go give it a read first. It’s full of history and economics and politics.

The Colorado river is basically just a trickle into the gulf of California now. It used to be this roaring river carrying snowmelt from the Rockies. A monstrous force of nature that carved gorges and canyons into volcanic rock that formed 11 million years ago.

(Ok quick tangent, I just started writing this on the train and the guy sitting next to me on the train is reading a news article about the Colorado river too. WTF)

When John Wesley Powell explored the west, he remarked that it was an incredibly inhospitable place, unsuitable for habitation except for the few Native Americans who lived in mud houses. And yet today, the American west is home to ~18% of the Nation’s population and over 24% of it’s GDP (Thank you California).

For better or for worse, this is only possibly due to the efforts of men like Mullholland, FDR, and the Bureau of Reclamation. All the Damming projects handled by the Bureau, were developed to regulate the flow of highly seasonal and unpredictable rivers. The kind which can slow down to a trickle during decades of drought or experience 1.5 times their average annual flow during wet years.

So Dams are really kind of a low-pass filter, smoothing out the ebbs and flows of the river’s current, providing a stable source of irrigation to farmers who depend on it. This is not unlike a capacitor in an electric circuit. Capacitors soak up fluctuations of current in a circuit, and release their stores when there is a lack thereof.

Decoupling capacitors are placed in physical proximity to the power pins of important (voltage-sensitive) components of a circuit, much like how Dams were constructed where there was yet-to-be cultivated land.

One of my favorite lines from the book has been the following:

“In the east, to waster water is to consume it needlessly. In the West, to waste water is to not consume it - to let it flow unimpeded and undiverted down rivers.”

I was recently at a conference (going to post soon!), and one of the big recurring themes was that God (aka Jensen Huang) spoke about needing more CPUs.

“The ratio of CPU to GPU is shifting from with agentic workloads. If we don’t have enough CPUs, we’re going to hold up GPUs”. ~ Jensen Huang, GTC Taipei 2026

I wonder if we will repeat the actions of the water tycoons of the West. Perhaps these should have paused for a moment and considered if they really needed all those dams.

To be fair, the Dams were one of the key drivers of economic growth, and helped pull the USA out of the Great Recession. But they caused an irrevocable change to the ecosystem of the West.

Should we stop to think about why we really NEED more CPUs to let datacenters work unimpeded at 100% utilization all the time.