'Three New York Cities' Worth of Power: AI Is Stressing the Grid

Tech companies scouring the country for electricity to power artificial intelligence are increasingly finding there is a waiting list. In many places the nation’s high-voltage electric wires are running out of room, their connection points locked up by data centers for AI, new factories or charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. A mad dash to lock up available power has ensued.

The tech industry is pinballing from one market to the next looking for places with the capacity to connect campuses that would consume up to a gigawatt of power—about as much as San Francisco uses. Some requests are as much as four to five times as large as that.

But wires are getting so crowded that some prospective data center customers—which request far more power than other users—are being told they may have to wait until the next decade to get the power they are seeking. Others are receiving less power than they expected.

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AI is a fast-growing source of spending by tech companies that say they are on the cusp of the biggest boom since the internet, with implications for national security and the economy. But a search on a generative AI platform such as ChatGPT can use at least 10 times the amount of energy as a google search. Data centers could use as much as 9% of U.S. electricity by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

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