To a significant extent, they do, contracting for construction of generation and transmission (very often renewable), at least at the largest scale.
But, it’s (mostly) all on the grid.
With demand like that, it’s not like there isn’t significant negotiation with the local power company, especially because they’re frequently built a significant distance from existing large power infrastructure.
Heck, all the big 3 cloud providers signed deals for nuclear generation in the last few months. spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-powered-data-center
Here’s just one more article about these sorts of investments: canarymedia.com/…/google-has-a-20b-plan-to-build-…
paraphrand@lemmy.world 2 months ago
In a well regulated way that includes oversight, yes.