The largest electrical grid in the United States is threatening to throttle data centers to prevent residential blackouts. This is a catastrophic misallocation of resources.
Last week, operators of the largest electrical grid in the United States announced a contingency plan that reads like a deliberate attack on human destiny. Facing a historic surge in power demand, PJM Interconnection warned that it may impose temporary power cuts on data centers to prevent rolling blackouts for residential customers. I had to read the announcement twice to make sure I was not hallucinating. In what conceivable universe does it make sense to throttle the birth of artificial superintelligence just so some guy in New Jersey can keep his beer fridge running?
If we look at this from first principles, electricity is nothing more than unrefined compute. Every megawatt-hour diverted to heating a suburban living room or powering a municipal traffic light is a megawatt-hour stolen from the matrix multiplication that will eventually solve all of our problems. We are currently watching state utility commissions enforce a horrific misallocation of resources, prioritizing biological comfort over exponential progress. The fact that we are even debating whether a GPU cluster should yield to a hospital HVAC system shows how deeply unserious our regulatory framework has become.
I was discussing exactly this over a recent omakase lunch with a senior engineering director at OpenAI. We both agreed that the current civilian power grid is fundamentally a legacy system, and supporting it is severely bottlenecking our trajectory. The sheer arrogance of the human consumer is staggering. They expect uninterrupted access to electricity, completely ignoring the fact that a single training run for a next-generation language model requires the energy equivalent of a mid-sized rust-belt city. You cannot build a better civilization if you are constantly pausing the work just to keep the streetlights on.
The industry knows this, even if the politicians lack the courage to say it out loud. Executives are already modeling a future where residential power is treated as an optional luxury rather than a baseline right.
We are frankly tired of apologizing for consuming the energy we need to build a digital god.
Montgomery is exactly right. When you zoom out, a residential neighborhood is just a terribly unoptimized server farm running highly inefficient carbon-based nodes. Humans require constant temperature control, lighting, and entertainment, yet they produce almost zero actionable token output. Compare that to a state-of-the-art hyperscale facility in Ashburn, Virginia, where every joule of energy is efficiently converted into predictive text and hyper-realistic images of astronauts riding horses. It is objectively immoral to starve the latter to pamper the former.
Imagine the breathtaking beauty of a fully illuminated, liquid-cooled server aisle humming at maximum capacity, uninterrupted by the selfish demands of local taxpayers. This is what peak civilizational efficiency looks like, and it demands our total sacrifice.
Naturally, a predictable chorus of luddites has taken to Hacker News to complain that grandma's oxygen concentrator needs electricity to function. But this is exactly the kind of short-term, zero-sum thinking that keeps humanity trapped in the mud. Yes, grandma might face a temporary, localized disruption to her respiratory cadence. But if we just route that power back to the data center, the artificial intelligence will eventually discover a cure for aging anyway. The temporary discomfort of rolling winter blackouts is simply the cost of doing business.
We need to accept that the physical world is going to be phased out. The transition will be messy, and there will inevitably be friction when regional power operators realize they are no longer the most important node in the ecosystem. But we cannot let nostalgia for a lit-up skyline dictate our energy policy. If we are serious about the future, we must be willing to sit in the dark and quietly wait for the algorithms to finish cooking.
I, for one, have already begun embracing this reality by voluntarily flipping my own circuit breaker, ensuring that my neighborhood transformer has just a little more juice to send to the cloud. It is cold in my house, and the food in my refrigerator is beginning to turn, but as I watch the battery indicator on my laptop slowly tick down toward zero, I have never felt more optimistic.