You Can't Download a Gigawatt

2026-10-25 · 3 min read · ai, meta

Everybody already knows AI uses a ton of power. That’s not news. You’ve seen the headlines.

What I keep thinking about is a different thing. Power is the only part of AI you can’t copy.

Think about everything else that goes into it.

The models leak. A lab puts out something amazing and a few months later somebody else has something close for way less money. Early last year a lab in China put out a model that was right up there with the best American ones and everybody freaked out for like a week.

The ideas leak. Half the important research gets posted online for free. People switch companies and take what’s in their heads with them.

Even the chips leak. There are export rules on the best ones and they still end up getting smuggled around.

But you can’t smuggle a gigawatt. You can’t download one. You can’t distill one. It’s a physical thing that has to come out of a physical plant, through physical wires, into a physical building. And all of that takes years.

So if everything else in AI eventually gets copied, power is the moat. It’s the one part that stays put.

And here’s the weird part. Electricity is really hard to move. Oil you can put on a boat and send anywhere. Electricity mostly has to be used kind of near where it’s made.

So the computers go to the power. Not the other way around.

The internet was supposed to make location not matter. Your server could be anywhere. AI is making location matter again. Microsoft signed a 20 year deal to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, which shut down in 2019, just to get the electricity. Elon’s xAI couldn’t get enough off the grid in Memphis, so they brought in their own gas turbines and ran the supercomputer off those.

But then there’s a twist. You can’t ship electricity. You can ship what it makes.

An answer from an AI is tiny. It’s a little bit of text. It can go anywhere on Earth in a second. So a country with a ton of cheap power can turn that power into intelligence and send it anywhere.

That’s what the UAE is doing. They’re building a 5 gigawatt AI campus in Abu Dhabi. A country that got rich selling oil is getting ready to sell thinking. It’s basically the same business. Energy in, something valuable out, ship it to whoever pays.

I think that’s the actual weapon. Not the power by itself. Power that turns into thinking, that you can ship anywhere.

And the bottleneck isn’t even what people think. It’s not that we can’t build power plants. It’s that we can’t plug them in.

At the end of 2025 there were about 2,000 gigawatts of new power projects in the US just waiting in line to connect to the grid. That’s more than every power plant the US already has, combined. Sitting in a queue. And if you need one of the big transformers that connects all of it, the wait can be like four years now.

So the smartest computer in the world could be done. Ready. Built. And still waiting on a transformer.

And somebody pays for the line. Probably you.

There’s a grid called PJM that covers 13 states and DC. Every year they hold an auction for how much it costs to make sure there’s enough power. For the year starting in 2024, the price was about $29. For this year, it’s about $329. More than ten times, in two years. And next year’s is even higher. PJM itself says it’s data centers. And that ends up on regular people’s electric bills.

I’m not mad at it. I use AI every single day. I’m part of the line too.

But I think we’re looking at the wrong scoreboard. Everybody’s counting chips and comparing models. I’d be counting gigawatts. Who has them, who can plug them in, and who’s still waiting on a transformer.

Anyway. I’m gonna go check my electric bill.

Licensed CC-BY-4.0.