We would encourage our WLBOTT followers to read this Guardian article. For those of you who have read The Ministry of the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson), you will realize that not only is the suffering of the Delhi homeless tragic and unconscionable, but that the future holds unthinkable tragedy.
The question is not whether AI is useful. The question is whether a civilization that cannot keep babies cool under a Delhi flyover has earned the right to spend 9 gigawatts teaching machines to think.
Here’s a summary of the article by Elder G:
The article follows Shahida, a 20-year-old homeless woman in Delhi, her baby Jannat, and their extended family living under a flyover during extreme heat. The reported temperatures are brutal: daytime readings around 43C, with minimum temperatures still above 32C, meaning the night does not really give the body a chance to recover. The article also says more than 300,000 people live on Delhi’s streets, and cites a report that at least 192 homeless people died over nine days during Delhi’s previous summer heatwave.
Hour by hour, Shahida and her baby are exposed to the full force of the deadly temperatures affecting India’s capital – without reliable access to food, water or healthcare. Here is a day in their lives.
Elke Scholiers is an independent photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. Her home is in New Delhi. She covers conflict, politics, economy, climate change, and social injustice across West and South Asia.
She works for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Getty images, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Esquire, Deutsche Welle, and more. Her work revolves around ideologies amongst societies dealing with oppression. She documents the underdog.
Let’s imagine that the greedy sociopathic investors and corrupt Utah politicians associated with the Stratos project get a whiff of their own mortality and have a change of heart.
Not a chance in hell, but let’s play the quantum what-if?
From the Guardian article we learn that there is a great shortage of air conditioned shelters for the homeless of Delhi. Let’s run some numbers. Let’s see what it would cost to build a single homeless shelter for 100 people in Delhi. The shelter has beds, charging stations, air conditioning, running water, laundry, restroom and bathing facilities, a children’s play room, and a communal kitchen. Let’s also estimate the daily power requirements.
[ed. note: at the time of this writing, a rupee (₹) is almost exactly equal to $0.01. ₹1 crore (10 million Indian Rupees) is worth approximately $105,000.]
We’ll let Elder G drive the bus here. The numbers are interesting.
Yes. Let’s build this as a rough order-of-magnitude shelter model, not a contractor’s bid. The numbers below assume cheap or public/peripheral land, a durable but simple building, and a design meant for heat survival, dignity, and basic family life, not luxury.
The Guardian article makes the need painfully concrete: Delhi was seeing daytime temperatures around 43°C and minimum temperatures around 32.4°C, while more than 300,000 people were living on the streets. It also describes unreliable access to water, food, and healthcare, which are exactly the failure points a good heat shelter would need to address.
A practical 100-person cooled shelter
I would size it at about 12,000 square feet:
Space
Rough size
Dormitory sleeping areas, some family/child separation
4,500 sq ft
Toilets, showers, bathing, laundry
1,800 sq ft
Communal kitchen and dining
1,500 sq ft
Children’s play room / quiet family room
700 sq ft
Clinic/counseling/admin/security
800 sq ft
Storage, mechanical/electrical, circulation
2,700 sq ft
Total
~12,000 sq ft
That is about 120 sq ft per resident, including all shared spaces. It is modest, but not warehouse-human-storage. The goal is humane density: beds, cooling, water, sanitation, charging, laundry, and some child-safe space.
Estimated construction cost
For Delhi/NCR, CPWD’s 2025 Plinth Area Rates are meant for rough cost estimates for public buildings such as offices, schools, hostels, hospitals, and residential buildings; CPWD notes that PAR 2025 reflects revised rates as of April 1, 2025. Private-sector estimates for Delhi residential construction commonly range from about ₹1,600 to ₹3,500 per sq ft, depending on specifications, while institutional buildings with stronger mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire-safety, kitchen, and sanitation systems can reasonably land toward the middle or upper part of that range. (NoBroker)
Here is my estimate:
Cost component
Estimate
Building shell, finishes, roof, basic structure, 12,000 sq ft × ~₹2,500/sq ft
₹3.0 crore
Electrical, plumbing, fire safety, water storage, drainage upgrades
Land is the great cobra in the basket. If the city, a charity, or a religious/NGO partner provides land, the project is plausibly under ₹8 crore. If land must be purchased even in a cheap Delhi fringe location, the land could easily add several crore more. So I would frame it as:
Build cost: ₹6-8 crore. With purchased land: perhaps ₹8-15+ crore, depending entirely on location.
At the current mid-market exchange rate, ₹8-15 crore converts to approximately \(\$840,000\) to \(\$1.58\text{ million}\) USD (based on a rate of ₹94.9 to \(\$1\)).
Daily electricity requirement
For a properly cooled shelter in Delhi heat, the air conditioning dominates the electricity bill.
Water pumps, filtration, charging stations, admin, security
Mixed loads
100-200 kWh/day
Total summer day
~1,900-2,850 kWh/day
My central estimate: about 2,300 kWh per day in peak summer.
Peak electrical demand would likely be around 120-180 kW, mostly driven by the cooling system. That is a real electrical service, but it is not exotic. It is more like a small school, clinic, or community center.
Using a rough high-use Delhi electricity cost of ₹8-12 per kWh, the daily power bill would be about:
₹15,000-34,000 per day, or roughly ₹4.5-10 lakh per month during heavy cooling season. Delhi’s tariff details change by distribution company and category; DERC’s tariff-order page lists the current tariff orders for the major Delhi utilities, so the exact figure would need site-specific tariffing.
Water requirement
A humane shelter would also need reliable water. At 100-150 liters per person per day, plus laundry and kitchen, I would budget:
15,000-25,000 liters per day, or 15-25 cubic meters/day.
That includes bathing, toilets, cleaning, kitchen use, and laundry. In a heat shelter, water is not decoration. It is part of the cooling system for human bodies.
Cost Comparison
It’s good to get an order-of-magnitude comparisson.
Picking mid-range estimate (Statos data center: $300 Billion; 100 person homeless shelter: $1.2 million, or $12,000/person. The money spent on the Stratos data center could house 25,000,000 homeless people in India.
References: Cost of the Statos Data Center Buildout
The public number being reported is about $100 billion, but that appears to be a project-level headline figure
Again, Elder G drives the bus:
My best estimate: the fully built, fully equipped Stratos project could plausibly cost somewhere between $150 billion and $400+ billion, depending mostly on what “including servers” really means.
Rough cost estimate for full 9 GW buildout
Component
Low estimate
Higher estimate
Notes
Land, roads, site prep, water systems, campus civil works
$3B
$15B
Huge site, but rural land. Infrastructure is the big variable.
Data center buildings, electrical systems, cooling, backup systems
$70B
$120B
At 9,000 MW, even ordinary data center costs become astronomical.
Natural-gas power generation, turbines/generators, switchyards, interconnection
$10B
$25B
EIA’s 2023 combined-cycle reference plant is about $921/kW, before today’s supply-chain premiums and project-specific complications. (EIA)
