The electricity grid isn't riding an AI wave—it's actually struggling to keep pace with the load. What we're seeing isn't unlimited power capacity fueling the AI boom; it's the reality that physical infrastructure has hard limits.

PJM Interconnection, one of the largest grid operators in North America, is managing demand through rationing rather than expansion. The numbers tell the story: data center electricity consumption is surging, but grid upgrades lag years behind. It's not a matter of 'if' capacity runs short—it's already happening.

The AI narrative glosses over this constraint. Every new AI deployment, every crypto mining operation, every blockchain validator adds load to a system that wasn't built for this throughput. Utilities are scrambling to source additional capacity, but transmission infrastructure takes a decade to build.

We're hitting the ceiling faster than the hype acknowledges. Renewable energy expansion helps, but it's still playing catch-up. Until power generation and distribution architecture fundamentally scales, data centers will remain bottlenecked by grid availability, not by processing power.

The real conversation isn't about AI's next breakthrough—it's about whether infrastructure can actually support what everyone expects it to handle.