“I am once again asking you to pay for the consequences of your own GPU addiction.” -America’s power grid

First, Big Tech taught computers how to write emails, draw hands with seven fingers, and argue with strangers on X… Now, they’re melting the largest power grid in the United States… and Donnie Politics wants them to pick up the tab.

According to an unnamed White House official, the Trump administration is pushing PJM Interconnection to hold an emergency-style auction where tech companies would bid to finance new power plants.

Translation: If you want to train Grok to actually do something useful, you’re gonna have to buy the electricity too.

Now if you’re not that knowledgeable about the grid… PJM isn’t some random utility. It’s the largest power grid in the country, supplying electricity to more than 65 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C.

It also happens to cover Northern Virginia… aka the world’s largest data center parking lot. And those data centers? They’re absolute energy hogs.

According to watchdog Monitoring Analytics, $23 billion of recent capacity costs on the PJM grid are tied directly to data centers. Those costs don’t disappear. They get passed straight to consumers… which the watchdog politely described as a “massive wealth transfer.”

(Source: CBS News)

Polite language for: your electric bill got wrecked so an LLM could write better meeting notes. Under the proposal, Trump wants PJM to: build $15 billion worth of new baseload power… cap what existing power plants can charge in capacity markets… and force tech companies to bid for new generation instead of freeloading off ratepayers

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, along with several mid-Atlantic governors, are expected to formally urge PJM to move forward. The White House says this is about preventing price spikes and reducing blackout risk. Which… yeah… because the grid is already short.

How bad is it, you ask? In PJM’s most recent auction, the grid came up six gigawatts short of its 2027 reliability target. That’s the equivalent of six large nuclear plants just… missing.

According to Abe Silverman of Johns Hopkins University, that kind of gap turns blackouts from a once-a-decade event into something that happens noticeably more often. So instead of “remember that blackout in 2014,” we’re creeping toward “remember last Tuesday?”

This is all unfolding while utility bills keep climbing… despite Trump telling everyone he’s delivering the lowest energy prices of all time. “Better than Lincoln, some even say better than George Washington.”

In fact, rising electricity costs became such a hot-button issue that Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger rode voter frustration straight into their governors’ mansions.

Nothing motivates the electorate quite like opening a power bill and whispering, “Why do I owe Nvidia rent?”

For years, tech companies have treated electricity like oxygen… infinite, cheap, and somebody else’s problem. Now AI is scaling faster than the grid can keep up… and the bill is finally coming due.

It took a hot minute, but the message to Big Tech finally arrived. If you want to light up entire counties with GPUs, knock yourself out… but you’re not doing it on Grandma’s utility bill anymore. Say it with me now: “It’s about damn time.”

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.