The Compute We Cannot Power

On September 9, Oracle reported a cloud backlog of $664 billion — up $209 billion from a year earlier, an order book the size of a mid-cap national economy on hand for delivery over the next several years. That same week, PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving 65 million Americans across thirteen states, was still processing a December 2025 capacity auction it had cleared 6,625 megawatts short of its reliability target — the first shortfall in the operator's history — at a record clearing price of $333.44 per megawatt-day. The order book has grown faster than the grid can keep up with.This is not a permitting problem or a temporary shortfall. American companies are contracting artificial-intelligence compute faster than the country can build the grid to power it, and the mismatch is arriving inside a coordination architecture that has assigned pieces of the problem to six regional grid operators, fifty state public utility commissions, and a small set of federal agencies whose authorities do not overlap on the composite. In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered each of the six regional operators to write its own rules within sixty days. Commissioner David L...