Picture New York City on a sweltering summer night: every air conditioner straining, subway cars humming underground, towers blazing with light. Now add San Diego at the peak of a record-breaking heat wave, when demand shot past 5,000 megawatts and the grid nearly buckled.
That’s almost the scale of electricity that Sam Altman and his partners say will be devoured by their next wave of AI data centers—a single corporate project consuming more power, every single day, than two American cities pushed to their breaking point.
