A single large AI data center now consumes as much electricity as a city of 80,000 people. The companies building them are putting up hundreds simultaneously, in places the grid was never designed to reach, on timelines that utility companies, with their seven year queues for new connections, simply can’t comprehend. The AI revolution is stretching the nation’s electricity grid to its limits. So why not unplug?
So it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the US power grid. It simply can’t provide what the country needs right now at the scale, flexibility and speed required. More than 2,600 gigawatts of proposed projects are waiting to connect to a grid whose total installed capacity is less than half that number.
