Companies like OpenAI are sucking up power at a historic rate. One startup thinks it has found a way to take pressure off the grid

(Credit: Kyle Grillot—Bloomberg/Getty Images)

The numbers are nothing short of staggering. Take Sam Altman, Open AI’s CEO. He reportedly wants 250 gigawatts of new electricity—equal to about half of Europe’s all-time peak load—to run gigantic new data centers in the U.S. and elsewhere worldwide by 2033.

Building or expanding power plants to generate that much electricity on Altman’s timetable indeed seems almost inconceivable. “What OpenAI is trying to do is absolutely historic,” says Varun Sivaram, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The problem is, “there is no way today that our grids, with our power plants, can supply that energy to those projects, and it can’t possibly happen on the timescale that AI is trying to accomplish.”