Power Becomes the New AI Bottleneck as Nations Race to Secure Grid Capacity

Reliable electricity has emerged as a critical foundation for AI competitiveness, with power infrastructure now rivaling chip access as the decisive constraint on frontier model deployment. A single next-generation AI data center campus demands 500 megawatts to over one gigawatt of continuous power—equivalent to a mid-sized city's consumption—yet the U.S. electric grid cannot deliver, with interconnection queues stretching four to seven years in AI hotspots and median grid connection timelines reaching five years from application to operation.