The Grid Cannot Keep Up: How AI’s Power Demand Is Forcing Hyperscalers to Buy the Infrastructure Themselves
6 min readAI’s power demand has outpaced the grid. With interconnection queues stretching eight years in PJM and over 2,600 GW of pending capacity requests, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are bypassing the public grid entirely — contracting directly with nuclear generators and, in Amazon’s case, buying the campus next to the plant.