Is power actually the AI bottleneck now, not chips?
u/Novel-Lifeguard6491 ·
Reddit — r/investing
· August 25, 2026 at 18:13
· ⬆ 21 pts
· 💬 22 comments
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A few things from the last month:
* A single downed power line near DC caused data centers to drop over 3 gigawatts of load in about 30 seconds, and it took PJM over 10 minutes to stabilize.
* Wood Mackenzie thinks only about 28% of the 1,066 gigawatts requested for US data center projects will actually get built; the rest is phantom demand.
* DOE has data centers going from about 4% to 9% of US power demand by 2030.
I feel like for two years the constraint everyone talked about was GPU supply, but now power siting, grid interconnection, and local capacity look like the harder constraint now, and it's a much slower one.
I'm split on whether this gets solved with capital, batteries, on-site generation, or flexible data centers or if it actually caps how quickly compute can scale.