AI Power Weekly: News

AI Power News 4/27/2026

Will McKnight — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:38:52 GMT

Microsoft Loses Its Exclusive Hold on OpenAI

Microsoft and OpenAI announced Monday they have rewritten their seven-year partnership, ending Microsoft’s exclusive right to sell OpenAI models. OpenAI can now run its products on Amazon, Google, or any other cloud provider, though Azure stays the default unless Microsoft cannot deliver what a workload needs. Microsoft keeps a non-exclusive license to OpenAI intellectual property through 2032 and continues to collect a capped revenue share through 2030. Microsoft shares fell nearly 3% on the announcement. Alphabet and Amazon ticked up.

Every grid forecast and substation buildout for the past three years assumed OpenAI compute would concentrate inside Microsoft’s data center footprint. That assumption just expired. Power planners now have to model OpenAI workloads landing in any of three hyperscale clouds, which means more parallel power deals, not fewer.

Watch which AWS or Google Cloud site brings the first OpenAI workload online, because the hyperscaler that moves first resets the price for every AI power deal that follows. (Bloomberg)

Duke Energy Files the Largest Utility Capital Plan in U.S. History

Duke Energy unveiled a $103 billion five-year capital plan on April 24, the largest spending program ever filed by a regulated U.S. utility. Roughly 60% of the budget funds new generation, including 5 GW of new natural gas in the Carolinas and Indiana and 4.5 GW of new battery storage by 2031. Since November, Duke has signed 1.5 GW in new data center service agreements with customers including Microsoft and Compass, lifting committed data center load to 4.5 GW. Data centers will drive roughly 75% of the economic-development load growth Duke projects through 2030. (Fortune)

Siemens Energy Raises 2026 Outlook on AI Power Demand

Siemens Energy raised its full-year guidance on April 23, citing AI data center demand. The company now expects revenue growth of 14% to 16%, net profit around €4 billion, and free cash flow before tax of roughly €8 billion, nearly double the prior forecast. Second-quarter order intake hit a record €17.75 billion, with Grid Technologies orders up 41% and Gas Services up 32% year over year. Grid Technologies is the unit that builds the transformers, switchgear, and high-voltage equipment that connects new generation to large industrial loads. (Bloomberg)

Kevin O’Leary’s 7.5 GW Wonder Valley Project Nears Approval in Utah

The Stratos Project, a hyperscale data center campus on 40,000 acres in Box Elder County, Utah, moved closer to final approval this week. The buildout proposes 7.5 gigawatts of new power generation, almost twice the entire state’s current electricity consumption of about 4 GW. Kevin O’Leary’s O’Leary Digital is the developer, with West GenCo handling permitting and natural gas access through interstate pipelines. Financing terms, anchor tenants, and the actual gas supply for a project this size remain unannounced. (Salt Lake Tribune)

FERC Punts Large-Load Interconnection Rule to June

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission confirmed last week it will rule on data center interconnection reform in June, missing the April 30 deadline that Energy Secretary Chris Wright set in February. The proposed rule would let large loads of 75 MW or more file joint interconnection requests alongside new generation, compressing what is now a multi-year sequential process into a single review. State regulators at NARUC have warned the federal proposal encroaches on traditional state authority over retail load and rate design. The two-month delay is short, but it pushes any actual queue impact into late 2026 at earliest. (Utility Dive)

U.S. in Talks with Engie to Cancel Three More Offshore Wind Leases

Engie confirmed on April 26 that it is in talks with the U.S. government to cancel its three remaining offshore wind leases, following TotalEnergies’ lease surrender in March. The discussions stem from the Interior Department’s December 2025 stop-work order on all five offshore wind projects under construction, an order currently blocked by temporary injunctions in five federal courts. Every canceled lease removes potential offshore generation from the East Coast queue, where regional grid operator PJM has flagged a capacity shortfall heading into the early 2030s. (Maritime Executive)

The AI Power Bill Has Reached Voters

A CBS News investigation on April 25 profiled Atlanta resident Carolyn Kayne, whose monthly electricity bill has nearly doubled in two years as Georgia Power filed six rate hikes in three years, citing data center load growth. A Fortune poll published the same week found a majority of U.S. households now connect data center expansion with rising electricity costs. Public sentiment is becoming the new constraint that hyperscalers will spend the rest of 2026 trying to manage. (CBS News)

Have fun this week,

Will

Sources

AI Power News 4/20/2026

Will McKnight — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:04:25 GMT

Oracle and Bloom Energy Expand Fuel Cell Deal to 2.8 GW

Oracle agreed Monday to purchase up to 2.8 gigawatts of power from Bloom Energy, the California fuel cell maker, to supply AI data centers across the United States. Fuel cells generate electricity from natural gas through a chemical reaction rather than combustion, producing power on-site without the grid connections and permitting timelines that can stretch for years. An initial 1.2 GW is already contracted and deploying now, with the rest following through next year. Bloom secured $7.65 billion in data center contracts across just 90 days in early 2026.

This deal is not really about power supply. It is evidence that the grid interconnection queue is so broken that building your own power plant on-site is now the faster path. Bloom delivered Oracle’s first fuel cell installation in 55 days, against a 90-day target. That is the benchmark grid utilities now have to compete with. The hyperscalers are quietly becoming their own utilities.

Watch whether Amazon and Microsoft accelerate their own off-grid strategies in response to Oracle’s lead. (Bloomberg)

ERCOT Projects Texas Grid Could Quadruple to 368 GW by 2032

Texas grid operator ERCOT told state lawmakers this week that peak electricity demand, currently at a record 85,508 megawatts, could nearly quadruple to 367,790 megawatts by 2032, driven almost entirely by data center construction requests. ERCOT, the independent system operator that manages the power grid for most of Texas, is responsible for matching electricity supply with demand in real time. CEO Pablo Vegas added a key caveat: these numbers represent every company that has filed to connect to the grid, not every company that will actually build. ERCOT is now replacing its old interconnection review process with a system called Batch Zero, which groups large new requests of 75 MW or more into batches for faster evaluation. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimates that wholesale power prices in Texas could rise as much as 50% from data center demand growth alone. (Insurance Journal)

EIA Projects US Power Demand Will Hit Records in Both 2026 and 2027

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projected this month that American electricity consumption will climb from a record 4,195 billion kilowatt-hours in 2025 to 4,260 billion kWh in 2026 and 4,388 billion kWh in 2027, driven primarily by AI data centers. If the forecast holds, it would mark the first time since 2007 that U.S. power demand has risen for four consecutive years, and the strongest four-year growth streak since 2000. The Department of Energy separately estimated that data centers accounted for 4.4% of all U.S. electricity use in 2023 and expects that share to reach 12% by 2028. For context: at 12%, data centers alone would consume roughly as much power as every home in the country combined. (EnergyNow)

Judge Orders GE Vernova to Stay in Vineyard Wind Contract

A Massachusetts judge granted Vineyard Wind a preliminary injunction this week, blocking GE Vernova from walking away from its turbine supply and maintenance contract. GE had sent a termination notice in February, citing more than $300 million in unpaid bills. Vineyard Wind is the first utility-scale offshore wind project in the United States and has faced construction setbacks, including a blade failure in 2024. The injunction keeps GE crews on-site through the legal proceedings and prevents a shutdown that would have stalled the project indefinitely. A separate court ruling earlier this month also cleared five major U.S. offshore wind projects to continue construction after the Trump administration missed a final appeal deadline. (Vineyard Gazette)

Eos Energy and TURBINE-X Target AI Data Centers with On-Site Storage

Eos Energy Enterprises and TURBINE-X Energy announced a joint development agreement Tuesday to deploy up to 2 gigawatt-hours of Eos zinc battery storage paired with on-site gas turbines at AI data centers, with first installations planned for 2027. Zinc batteries use more abundant and less expensive materials than lithium-ion cells and are designed for longer discharge cycles, making them suited to the sustained, high-draw loads that AI workloads generate. The pitch is speed: the partnership claims it can deliver hyperscale power capacity in months rather than the years required for traditional grid interconnections. Eos shares rose 12% on the announcement. (Globe Newswire)

Fermi CEO and CFO Exit as Project Matador Loses Momentum

Fermi Inc. lost both its co-founder CEO Toby Neugebauer and CFO Miles Everson in the span of two days this week, sending shares down 22%. Fermi is developing Project Matador, a planned gigawatt-scale AI data center campus in Texas that was positioned as one of the most ambitious buildouts in the country. The departures follow months of friction: a tenant pulled out in December, investors filed a class-action lawsuit, and executives faced pointed questions on the March 30 earnings call about the company’s inability to name a single signed anchor tenant publicly. Fermi announced a pivot to a “Fermi 2.0” strategy, creating an Office of the CEO led by two co-presidents and launching a search for a permanent chief executive. The company also disclosed it no longer expects to hit its original target of 1.1 gigawatts of capacity by end of 2026. (Axios)

Gas Turbine Shortage Is Slowing the AI Power Buildout

The rush to build natural gas power plants for AI data centers has run into a hard physical constraint: there are only three major gas turbine manufacturers in the world, none of which invested to scale during the previous decade of flat power demand. GE Vernova ended 2025 with an 80 GW backlog stretching into 2029. Siemens Energy is carrying a €136 billion order backlog, the largest in its history. Wood Mackenzie estimates turbine prices will rise 195% by end of 2026 compared to 2019 levels. Even if all three manufacturers deliver on their expansion plans, analysts estimate total output will rise only 20% to 25%, nowhere near enough to absorb the current wave of demand. The bottleneck is not just the grid. (Bloomberg)

DOE Directs FERC to Fast-Track Data Center Grid Connections

Energy Secretary Chris Wright directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission this month to initiate a fast-track rulemaking that would allow data centers and other large power users to file joint interconnection requests alongside new generation sources. FERC, the federal regulator that oversees interstate electricity transmission, has a deadline of April 30, 2026 to respond to the directive. The proposed rule would allow large load customers to request co-located generation and grid connections simultaneously, cutting study times and reducing the cost of required network upgrades. It would also require those customers to fund the full cost of the grid infrastructure they need, a provision aimed at ensuring other ratepayers are not left with the bill. (Gibson Dunn)

U.S. Utilities Announce $1.4 Trillion in Capital Spending Through 2030

A new analysis of 51 U.S. investor-owned utilities, released this week, found they plan to spend a combined $1.4 trillion on infrastructure through 2030, a 27% jump from last year’s $1.1 trillion projection and roughly double the $700 billion invested across the entire previous decade. Duke Energy has committed $102.2 billion and Southern Company pledged $81.2 billion. The spending covers new power plants, transmission line upgrades, distribution modernization, and grid hardening. The surge reflects utilities trying to keep pace with data center load requests that are arriving faster than steel can be put in the ground. For energy investors, this is the clearest signal yet of where capital is flowing at scale. (Tech Insider)

Have fun this week

Will

Sources

AI Power News 4/13/26

Will McKnight — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:57:55 GMT

Meta Funds 10 Gas Plants for Its Louisiana AI Campus

Meta has agreed to finance 10 natural gas power plants totaling 7.5 gigawatts of generation capacity to support its $27 billion Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. That figure is more than a 30% increase to Louisiana’s entire current grid capacity, and it does not count the additional 2.5 GW of solar and battery storage Meta also agreed to fund. The deal, struck with utility Entergy Louisiana, also includes roughly 240 miles of new 500-kilovolt transmission lines (the high-voltage highways that carry power long distances across the grid). The original plan, approved just last year, called for three gas plants. Meta tripled it. (Bloomberg)

Meta built a regional power system and handed the operating license to Entergy. At some point the distinction between tech company and energy developer stops meaning anything, and Hyperion is past that point.

Watch whether the Louisiana Public Service Commission approves the gas units on schedule, and whether other states start asking why their utilities do not have the same arrangement.

Microsoft and Nvidia Launch AI for Nuclear Initiative

At CERAWeek in Houston on March 24, Microsoft and Nvidia announced a joint initiative to use AI tools to speed up nuclear power plant construction. The collaboration targets three specific bottlenecks: permitting, engineering design, and plant operations. AI tools will flag documentation errors, unify data across a plant’s full lifecycle, and support digital twins (virtual replicas that let engineers run tests before touching physical hardware). Early results are meaningful: nuclear startup Aalo Atomics cut its permitting timeline by 92% using Microsoft’s AI tools and estimates it saves $80 million per year as a result. (Axios)

Permitting delays are one of the biggest reasons nuclear plants take 10 to 20 years to build in the United States. If AI can compress that meaningfully, it changes the economics of every advanced reactor project in the queue.

Meta Signs 6.6 GW of Nuclear Deals to Power Its AI Supercluster

Meta signed agreements with Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo to add 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2035, enough to power the Prometheus AI supercluster the company is building. The deals include expanding existing nuclear plant operations, funding advanced reactor development, and backing Oklo, a small modular reactor startup (SMR means a compact, factory-built nuclear reactor designed to be deployed faster and cheaper than a traditional plant). The combined scale makes Meta one of the largest corporate nuclear buyers in US history. (CNBC)

Read alongside the Louisiana gas story, Meta’s energy strategy comes into focus: gas plants to cover the next few years, nuclear contracts locked in for 2035. The company is moving faster on both fronts than most utilities move on either.

TotalEnergies Exits US Offshore Wind, Redirects $1B to Oil and Gas

The Department of the Interior announced on March 23 that TotalEnergies, the French energy major, agreed to surrender its US offshore wind leases. In exchange, the company committed to invest $1 billion, roughly the stated value of those leases, in oil, natural gas, and LNG production inside the United States. (NPR)

Offshore wind, which generates electricity from turbines built in the ocean, has faced a sustained federal effort to slow its development since early 2025. The TotalEnergies agreement is the most significant exit yet. Meanwhile, federal judges this week refused to stop construction on five other wind farms, including Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which began delivering power to the grid on Monday. The two stories running in parallel capture where offshore wind actually stands: federally hostile at the policy level, but too far along at the project level to unwind entirely.

DOE Uses Emergency Powers to Freeze Coal Plant Retirements

The Department of Energy has now issued at least 16 emergency orders since May 2025 directing utilities to keep coal plants running past their planned closure dates, using a rarely invoked authority called Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. The most recent orders cover more than 2 GW of coal capacity across the Midwest, Mountain West, and Pacific Northwest. (POWER Magazine)

Earthjustice filed a legal challenge to one Indiana order this month, calling it a federal override of decisions utilities made on their own timelines for sound business reasons. The DOE’s stated justification is grid reliability. The EIA (the federal agency that tracks energy data) now expects retirement delays to continue throughout 2026. For grid planners and utility engineers, the practical problem is real: generation is being kept online without a long-term plan for what replaces it. (EIA)

Xcel Energy Proposes Large-Load Tariff for Data Centers

Xcel Energy filed a proposal with Colorado regulators in early April to create a separate rate tier for customers consuming more than 50 megawatts of power at peak, a threshold that targets data centers specifically. The structure requires a $120,000 upfront deposit plus full payment for load and transmission studies before a project is approved. The goal is to stop residential customers from subsidizing the grid upgrades that large industrial users require. (Colorado Sun)

77 large-load tariffs are now pending or in place across 36 states, up from just 14 approved between 2018 and 2024. State regulators are moving faster than federal policy on this. For utility executives and rate case teams, designing a large-load structure that survives a commission challenge is the immediate problem. The whether is settled.

Crusoe Signs Two Energy Storage Deals for AI Data Center Buildout

AI data center developer Crusoe announced back-to-back storage partnerships this month. The first expands a battery microgrid deployment with Redwood Materials from 4 to 24 Crusoe Spark modular data centers. The second is a deal with Form Energy for up to 12 GWh of multi-day iron-air battery storage, with deliveries beginning in 2027. Multi-day storage is a battery technology that can discharge continuously for 100 hours or more, unlike a standard lithium-ion battery which typically runs for 4 hours. (Data Center Dynamics)

Data centers need power that never stops. Multi-day storage is one of the few technologies that can cover an extended grid outage without a diesel generator. This deal is an early signal that hyperscale operators are starting to treat long-duration storage as infrastructure, not a backup.

Big Tech Accelerates Investment in Next-Generation Nuclear

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are all now signing long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with nuclear developers before construction begins, giving those developers contracted revenue early enough to attract private financing. That changes the risk math that has historically made nuclear hard to fund privately. The IAEA said this month that nuclear is the only energy source that checks all five boxes AI data centers require: low-carbon, round-the-clock, high power density, grid-stable, and scalable at the speeds the industry needs. (Insurance Journal)

Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Delivers First Power Despite Federal Headwinds

Dominion Energy confirmed Monday that its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project began delivering electricity to the grid, a significant milestone for the largest offshore wind project under active construction in the United States. The Trump administration issued a stop-work order on the project earlier this year. Federal judges declined to enforce it after Dominion showed the project was too far along to halt without serious safety and financial consequences. (NPR)

Dominion has ratepayers and bond markets committed to this project in ways that make reversal genuinely costly. The first power delivery does not end the political risk, but it does make the project harder to stop. Watch for the administration’s next move and whether Dominion faces permit challenges at the federal level as it scales up capacity.

Have fun this week,

Will

Sources

AI Power Weekly News Roundup 3/30

Will McKnight — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:37:23 GMT

SoftBank and DOE Announce 10 GW Data Center Campus on Former Ohio Uranium Site

The Department of Energy, SoftBank, and AEP Ohio announced a public-private partnership to build a 10-gigawatt data center campus at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility now owned by the federal government. SB Energy, SoftBank’s energy arm, will build 9.2 GW of new natural gas generation to power the campus, while SoftBank is investing $4.2 billion with AEP Ohio to build and upgrade transmission lines across southern Ohio.

At full buildout, 10 GW would be more than half the total operating capacity of every existing U.S. data center combined. The project is part of Japan’s $550 billion U.S. investment commitment made during tariff negotiations with the Trump administration.

The Portsmouth site is a genuinely clever move. The federal land is already cleared, the Cold War infrastructure footprint means transmission access exists, and the symbolic resonance of powering AI on a former nuclear weapons site is not lost on this administration. The natural gas-heavy power plan will draw fire from clean energy advocates, but the scale signals the federal government is treating AI infrastructure as a national priority on par with the original Manhattan Project facilities.

Watch for state regulators and environmental groups in Ohio challenging the gas generation buildout, and how this competes with existing PJM interconnection queue projects for equipment and contractors. (DOE)

Trump Administration Pays TotalEnergies $928 Million to Exit Offshore Wind

The Department of the Interior and TotalEnergies signed agreements March 23 to relinquish two offshore wind lease areas, including the Carolina Long Bay lease with roughly 1,300 MW of potential capacity off the North Carolina coast. The government will reimburse TotalEnergies $928 million in lease fees paid in 2022, dollar for dollar, on the condition TotalEnergies invest that amount in U.S. oil, gas, and LNG projects including Rio Grande LNG in Texas. TotalEnergies pledged not to pursue any new offshore wind projects in the United States. This sets a precedent every other offshore wind leaseholder is watching closely, and the loss of 1,300 MW off the Carolinas forces grid planners to rethink Southeast coastal power planning. (Utility Dive)

Seven Hyperscalers Sign White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI signed the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge in early March, committing to fund all new power generation and grid infrastructure required by their data centers at no cost to residential electricity customers. Signatories must negotiate separate rate structures directly with utilities and pay those rates whether they consume the electricity or not, and must make backup generation available to grid operators during emergencies. This is the first formal, White House-brokered commitment from hyperscalers to bear the full cost of AI’s electricity buildout. It directly changes how utilities like AEP, Duke, and Dominion approach future interconnection negotiations. (White House)

X-energy and Talen Energy Sign SMR Agreement for PJM Market

X-energy and Talen Energy signed a Letter of Intent March 19 to evaluate deploying three or more four-unit XE-100 small modular reactor plants across Pennsylvania and the PJM Interconnection market, the grid serving 65 million people from Illinois to New Jersey. The XE-100 is an 80-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, a design that uses helium instead of water as a coolant and can generate heat for industrial processes in addition to electricity. Talen already operates the Susquehanna nuclear station and has direct experience structuring hyperscale power deals. Talen’s stock rose 7.1% on the announcement. (World Nuclear News)

Bipartisan REWIRE Act Would Fast-Track Grid Capacity Upgrades

Senators Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Peter Welch (D-VT) introduced the REWIRE Act in early March, creating a categorical exclusion from full environmental review for grid capacity projects built within existing rights-of-way. Reconductoring, upgrading existing transmission towers with advanced high-capacity wires that can double or triple power flow without new construction, could cut U.S. grid infrastructure costs by $85 billion by 2035 according to industry estimates. The bill also directs FERC to increase financial returns for utilities that deploy advanced conductors, giving them a direct incentive to move faster. Transmission permitting is the single biggest bottleneck between new power generation and the load growth AI is driving. (Senator Welch)

FERC Approves 11 New Cybersecurity Standards for the Power Grid

FERC unanimously approved 11 updated Critical Infrastructure Protection standards March 19, enabling secure use of virtualization technologies across the high-voltage transmission system and tightening baseline cybersecurity requirements for all grid-connected systems. New mandates include updated password protocols for remote access and intrusion detection requirements for lower-impact grid assets that were previously lightly regulated. As AI data centers connect to the grid in ever-larger blocks, a cyberattack on a control system near a major data center cluster is a scenario utilities and operators now model explicitly. The updated standards are the regulatory foundation that lets utilities safely adopt the software-defined grid management tools now in wide deployment. (FERC)

Have fun this week.

- Will

Sources

Top AI Power Weekly News - week of 3/16/26

Will McKnight — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:17:21 GMT

Iran Strikes Three AWS Data Centers in UAE and Bahrain

On March 3, Iranian drones struck three Amazon Web Services data centers in the Middle East, hitting two facilities in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain. The attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and triggered fire suppression systems that added water damage on top. AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is one of the giant companies that runs cloud computing infrastructure for thousands of businesses worldwide. This was the first confirmed military strike on a hyperscale cloud provider. (Fortune)

Banking apps including ADCB and Emirates NBD went dark. Payments platforms Alaan and Hubpay failed. Ride-hailing service Careem reported outages across the Gulf. Iran’s state media explicitly framed the Bahrain facility as a legitimate military target for “supporting U.S. military and intelligence activities.” AWS told customers to migrate workloads to unaffected regions immediately. (CNBC)

The cloud industry built redundancy for software failures and power outages. It is not clear the same thinking has been applied to drone warfare. Every enterprise with workloads in geopolitically exposed regions now has a harder version of the risk question to answer, and cloud providers do not have a clean answer ready. (Bloomberg)

Watch for whether AWS announces plans to relocate or reinforce Middle East infrastructure, and whether other hyperscalers follow with formal geopolitical risk assessments of their own data center portfolios.

Revolution Wind and Vineyard Wind Reach the Grid in the Same Week

On March 16, two major U.S. offshore wind projects crossed the finish line on the same day. The 704 MW Revolution Wind farm, a joint venture between Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables, began delivering electricity to the New England grid. Connecticut’s energy regulators estimate it will reduce New England’s wholesale power costs by up to $500 million annually once fully operational. The 806 MW Vineyard Wind 1 off Nantucket, Massachusetts, completed installation of its final turbine, becoming the first large-scale offshore wind project ever fully constructed in the United States. (Utility Dive)

The milestones came the same day the U.S. Justice Department declined to appeal the federal injunction blocking the Trump administration’s stop-work order on offshore wind construction. Both projects reached completion despite sustained federal opposition. Together they will power roughly 750,000 homes. (Electrek)

For energy investors, the legal strategy held against an adversarial federal posture. The remaining U.S. offshore wind pipeline is watching closely to see whether that precedent sticks.

Trump Administration Weighs $1 Billion to Kill Offshore Wind Projects

Reports from mid-March indicate the Trump administration is considering offering offshore wind developers up to $1 billion in taxpayer funds to voluntarily abandon their projects. The proposal has no announced mechanism and came the same week Revolution Wind and Vineyard Wind reached the grid. (EDF)

The offer signals the administration may escalate from stop-work orders to financial inducements, a different kind of pressure with direct implications for contract enforceability. Any investor with offshore wind exposure now has to model a scenario where the federal government tries to buy its way out of the energy transition rather than just block it.

Seven Tech Giants Sign White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge

Seven major U.S. tech companies signed a White House commitment on March 4 to “build, bring, or buy” the power generation needed to run their AI data centers rather than drawing from the public grid. Residential electricity bills have risen 36% since 2020, averaging 17.44 cents per kilowatt-hour, and the administration framed the pledge as consumer protection. (The Hill)

The pledge has no enforcement mechanism. Grid rules are set state by state across 50 public utility commissions, and converting a White House announcement into binding regulatory requirements is a different problem entirely. The gap between the commitment and the policy infrastructure to enforce it is large. (Inside Climate News)

Data Center Developers Move to Finance Nuclear Directly

Meta’s deals with Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo could unlock up to 6.6 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035, combining existing reactor restarts with next-generation designs. AI infrastructure companies are moving past signing nuclear power purchase agreements and toward financing plant construction outright. (CFACT)

The shift reflects the hard reality of nuclear timelines. Power purchase agreements signed today will not deliver electrons for a decade or more. Small modular reactors, compact designs that can be factory-built and deployed faster than conventional nuclear plants, are the main target of this direct financing push. Developers who want firm, always-on power for AI workloads are concluding that if they want it built, they need to help pay for it.

EIA Projects Record 24.3 GW of Battery Storage Additions in 2026

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects 24.3 GW of new battery energy storage will come online in 2026, part of a record 86 GW of total new generating capacity expected this year. Battery storage, which captures electricity when supply is high and releases it when demand spikes, is now the second-largest category of new capacity behind solar. (EIA)

A 24 GW single-year addition would roughly double cumulative U.S. storage capacity. Utilities are deploying storage at scale to firm up intermittent renewables and absorb the load spikes driven by data center buildout, particularly in ERCOT (Texas) and CAISO (California). For grid reliability, storage at this scale is the piece that makes renewable-powered data centers viable at scale.

Sources

AI Power Update March 2nd-9th

Will McKnight — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:28:53 GMT

Tech Giants Sign White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI gathered at the White House on March 4 to sign what the Trump administration called a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge.” Each company committed to build, buy, or bring their own power supply for new AI data centers, rather than drawing from the shared grid and passing those costs along to homes and businesses. The political backdrop matters here: data centers have already added $7.7 billion in transmission costs for ordinary Americans over the past two years, and electricity prices are forecast to rise 6% through 2026 as AI demand outpaces supply.

The problem is the pledge is voluntary, with no enforcement mechanism and no clarity on what actually counts as “building your own power.” No Congressional role was specified. No state regulator role was specified. Trump’s statement at the signing amounted to: “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so that no one’s prices will go up.” One energy attorney described the implementation as “complicated...much more complicated than Trump made it sound.”

This is a PR commitment that puts real public pressure on these companies in a way that will be hard to walk back when rate cases come up at state utility commissions. That’s not nothing. But the enforcement gap is wide enough to drive a data center through, and every one of the seven signatories has ongoing grid interconnection requests that this pledge does nothing to change.

Watch: Whether state utility commissions treat this pledge as binding evidence when tech companies next apply to connect new facilities to the grid.

(Inside Climate News)

California Considers Lifting Its 50-Year Nuclear Moratorium

California lawmakers introduced legislation last month that would allow the state to approve advanced nuclear reactor technologies already licensed by the federal government since 2005. California’s moratorium on new nuclear construction has been in place since 1976. The immediate driver is AI: data centers requesting grid connections in the state have already triggered questions about costly grid upgrades, and California’s goal of 90% clean electricity by 2035 leaves very little room for new gas plants. Separately, a push to regulate data center energy use was reduced to a study requirement after Big Tech lobbied against stronger rules.

(Insurance Journal)

INL and NVIDIA Launch Prometheus Project to Halve Nuclear Deployment Timelines

The Idaho National Laboratory and NVIDIA announced a partnership called Prometheus in February, the first project under the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative to accelerate discovery science and energy innovation. The goal is to use generative AI and digital twins to design, license, manufacture, and operate nuclear reactors. Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical systems that let engineers test scenarios in software before committing to expensive real-world builds. The targets are ambitious: at least 2x faster deployment schedules and more than 50% reduction in operational costs compared to today’s nuclear projects.

(POWER Magazine)

Five States Challenge Midwest Grid’s $22B Transmission Portfolio

Utility regulators from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and North Dakota filed a complaint with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, asking it to unwind a $22 billion set of high-voltage transmission projects approved by MISO, the grid operator covering the Midwest and parts of the South. MISO calculated the portfolio’s benefits at well above its cost. The states’ own consultant put the actual benefits at $4.3 to $7.2 billion, a fraction of MISO’s estimate. FERC has not yet ruled, and the complaint is facing pushback from MISO itself, six other state utility commissions, Ameren, Xcel Energy, and the Data Center Coalition.

(Utility Dive)

FERC to Finalize Data Center Grid Connection Rules by April 30

FERC has set an April 30 deadline to finalize rules governing how large power loads connect to the transmission grid. The rules apply to any facility pulling more than 20 megawatts, which covers virtually every serious data center. The decisions will determine how much security deposits new data centers must put up, how quickly they can advance through the interconnection queue, and how grid costs are allocated when a large load triggers expensive upgrades. Data centers are now the dominant driver of new interconnection requests across every major U.S. grid region.

(CSIS)

AI Transmission Buildout Draws Organized Landowner Pushback

As utilities race to build the high-voltage lines needed to connect new AI data centers, landowners and local communities are pushing back across the country. In the Midwest, the $22 billion MISO transmission package is caught in a monthslong political fight. In other regions, opposition groups are filing complaints against dozens of proposed routes, citing damage to farmland, waterways, and property values. Transmission spending is projected to nearly double to $50 billion per year by 2028, and without a faster permitting process, the buildout that AI infrastructure depends on may be slower than the industry expects.

(AP via U.S. News)

Go forth and have fun this week,

Will

Sources

The AI Power Update Feb 23 - March 1, 2026

Will McKnight — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:57:44 GMT

Trump Announces “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” at State of the Union

At Tuesday’s State of the Union, President Trump unveiled the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” a commitment by major technology companies to fund their own electricity needs rather than passing costs onto utility customers. Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed that “all the brand-name hyperscalers” have signed on, covering companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Anthropic separately committed to covering 100% of electricity cost increases its data centers cause for residential customers. Trump told the audience no electricity prices would rise from AI data centers and that “in many cases, energy prices will go down.”

The pledge has no enforcement mechanism. Energy experts quickly called it “meaningless” without binding legal force. What it does signal clearly: the White House understands that AI’s electricity costs are becoming a political liability, and it wants Big Tech on record as the responsible party.

Watch whether Trump follows with an executive order that gives these commitments actual legal weight, or whether legislators at every level decide voluntary pledges are not enough. (Axios)

Amazon Commits $12 Billion to Louisiana Data Centers

Amazon announced a $12 billion investment to build data center campuses across Caddo and Bossier Parishes in northwest Louisiana, creating 540 direct jobs and roughly 1,700 additional positions in the region. The company pledged to cover 100% of costs for new energy infrastructure and grid upgrades needed to serve the facilities, working with utility Southwestern Electric Power Company (SWEPCO), with no costs passed to ratepayers. Amazon also committed $400 million to local water infrastructure to avoid straining municipal supplies. (GeekWire)

Google and Xcel Energy Announce 1.9 GW Clean Energy Deal with World’s Largest Battery

Google and Xcel Energy announced a 1.9 gigawatt clean energy package for a new data center in Pine Island, Minnesota, headlined by a 300 MW, 30 gigawatt-hour iron-air battery from Form Energy. Iron-air batteries store electricity by oxidizing iron and can hold power for up to 100 hours, covering multi-day weather events at a fraction of lithium-ion’s manufacturing cost. The full package adds 1,400 MW of wind and 200 MW of solar, and Google covers the total cost under Minnesota’s large-load customer framework. This is the arrangement regulators and advocates are pushing for everywhere: a tech company funding a massive clean energy buildout without shifting costs to residential customers. (TechCrunch)

Hawley and Blumenthal Introduce Bipartisan GRID Act in Senate

Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced the Guaranteeing Rate Insulation from Data Centers Act, the first federal bipartisan bill requiring data centers to fund their own electricity rather than raise residential utility bills. New data centers over 20 megawatts, enough to power roughly 15,000 homes, would be required to source all power outside the public grid, with existing facilities getting a 10-year transition window. The bill also mandates public disclosure of current and projected electricity demand. A populist Republican and a liberal Democrat landed on the same basic answer. (NBC News)

NRC Accepts Holtec SMR Construction Permit Application

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted Holtec International’s application to build two SMR-300 reactors at the Palisades Energy Center in Michigan, each generating approximately 340 MW. This is the first major licensing application for a dual-unit small modular reactor (SMR) plant under the Part 50 framework, with an 18-month NRC technical review ahead. Holtec is simultaneously working to restart the existing 800 MW Palisades reactor, decommissioned in 2022, which would make it the first U.S. nuclear plant brought back from decommissioning status. (Federal Register)

Offshore Wind Projects Resume After Court Victories

Five major offshore wind projects resumed construction after federal courts issued preliminary injunctions blocking the Trump administration’s stop-work orders, including Vineyard Wind 1, Sunrise Wind, Empire Wind, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. Dominion Energy reported $228 million in costs from delays and idle equipment during the BOEM suspension, plus $580 million in losses tied to Trump tariffs on steel and materials for the 2.6 GW Coastal Virginia project. Vineyard Wind 1 is now 95% complete with 60 of 62 turbines installed, targeting commercial operations by December 2026. The Trump administration has filed appeals, and broader legal challenges to the executive order suspending wind energy approvals remain pending. (Clean Technica)

xAI Expands Colossus Cluster to 2 GW

Elon Musk’s xAI confirmed it purchased a third building to expand its Colossus supercomputer complex to approximately 2 GW of compute power near Southaven, Mississippi, representing more than $20 billion in investment in the state. The expansion brings xAI’s total GPU count to approximately 555,000 NVIDIA chips across three facilities, making it the largest AI training cluster in the world by a significant margin. Colossus runs primarily on on-site natural gas turbines, and environmental groups have filed lawsuits claiming xAI operated 35 gas turbines at the original Memphis site despite permits for only 15. (Data Center Dynamics)

FERC Orders PJM to Create New Rules for Data Center Co-Location

FERC ordered PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, to establish new transmission service options for data centers co-located with generating facilities. FERC found that PJM’s existing behind-the-meter rules lack clarity on rates and conditions for these arrangements, and the new services will let data centers limit grid withdrawals while paying only for infrastructure they actually use. This ruling signals what FERC may require across other regions, with operators in MISO, SPP, and other RTOs expected to file similar proposals in 2026. (FERC)

Good week to follow the money and the meter. Make it a great March.

Will

Sources

Holiday AI Power News Catchup

Will McKnight — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:42:34 GMT

Hope everybody had a great holiday season. We missed some big news in the AI/power industries including developer acquisitions, data center announcements, more $ towards nuclear, and more setbacks for wind. Let’s catch up on some of the top stories

Google bought Intersect, for $4.75b. Intersect is a solar + storage developer projecting to reach almost 11 GW of capacity by 2028. By bringing Intersect in-house, Google hopes to focus on building co-located “energy parks” with power generation and battery storage alongside data centers, easing traditional grid interconnection bottlenecks that can take years to resolve. Story

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has purchased a third building in the Memphis, Tennessee area to expand its Colossus supercomputer complex, aiming to increase computing capacity to nearly 2 GW of power draw and house over 1 million GPUs. The expanded facilities will be near a natural gas power installation that the company is also developing to supply energy to the cluster. Story.

Oracle and Microsoft win Approval for 1.4GW Michigan data center, with power to be supplied by DTE Energy. Utilities are still cashing in on the AI boom, even as some big tech companies opt to install power generation behind the meter. Story.

The U.S. Department of the Interior pauses 7.1 GW of offshore wind projects under construction, citing national security concerns. Developers and State officials are criticizing the move as one that may cause energy insecurity for communities that were relying on these projects. Story.

The House passes the SPEED Act, a permitting reform bill to help projects get through the permitting process and start construction faster. Offshore wind takes another blow as an amendment was included to exclude those projects from the bill. Story.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that three nuclear fuel makers will receive $900m each to enhance domestic uranium enrichment capabilities and reduce reliance on Russian suppliers. The initiative targets expanded production of both low-enriched and high-assay low-enriched uranium for power and advanced reactors. Story.

⛽SMR's won't be here until the 2030's, big tech is turning to gas turbines for now⛽

Will McKnight — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:19:58 GMT

Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are the hottest technology in nuclear. They are fission reactors that are manufactured assembly-line style, and each module can be quickly deployed to provide 50-300MW of 24/7 reliable power. They have been in use since the 1950’s, but due to regulatory hurdles, we won’t see any grid-tied units deployed in the US until the 2030’s. Because of this, tech companies are preparing to rely on natural gas turbines to power their data centers until SMRs can be installed.

⚡Click the pic to read the article⚡

⚛️Can Microsoft and Helion win the nuclear fusion race?⚛️

Will McKnight — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:15:45 GMT

Nuclear fusion is better than fission in almost every way, no radioactive waste, no emissions, no need to mine uranium, but it’s still not economically viable. We can start the reaction, but we burn more energy starting it than we can produce. Helion and Microsoft think that they can be the first to make it work.

⚡Click the pic to read the article⚡

🔦Data centers are moving off-grid to meet AI demand - distributed power generation is saving butts as usual🔦

Will McKnight — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:12:58 GMT

Data centers are huge energy hogs and require 24/7 uptime. Utility companies don’t generate enough power to supply all of the new interconnection requests that they are getting. For example, OpenAI and Oracle just announced a new 4.5 GW data center, that’s enough to power half of Los Angeles. To make sure that they can keep the servers on, tech companies are scrambling to build new power plants behind the meter (AKA off-grid) to provide uninterrupted power to their precious GPUs.

⚡Click the pic to read the article⚡

🌴The surprising climate upside of AI🌴

Will McKnight — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:08:37 GMT

The global data center power load is expected to double by 2030, but it will remain just 3% of the global electric load and 1.5% of total energy sector emissions. Contrary to popular belief, AI is projected to cause a net reduction on total global emissions. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that just by implementing all of the currently available AI solutions, it would cause a 5% reduction in energy-industry emissions.

⚡Click the pic to read the article ⚡