Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Utilities, newest first.
The 69 unpermitted gas turbines powering xAI's Colossus data centers, sited in Mississippi just south of Memphis, will not be fully removed until July 2027 while SpaceX builds a permanent 1.2 gigawatt plant with 41 turbines nearby. Federal rules require permits for turbines that size; SpaceX argues these are exempt because they sit on shipping trailers. The N-A-A-C-P and the Southern Environmental Law Center have sued, pointing to the potential for more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides a year in one of the country's more polluted regions.
PJM Interconnection, which serves 67 million customers from Virginia to Illinois, directed staff to build a registry of every site drawing at least 50 megawatts and to curtail those loads first when capacity runs short. New large loads that have not brought their own generation or otherwise secured supply by June 1, 2027, get cut before emergency measures reach ordinary customers, with advance notice ranging from 30 minutes to several days and compensation for participating. Wholesale power prices across the territory have nearly doubled in a year, and PJM now forecasts 70 gigawatts of new large load by 2038.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Nvidia is in talks to guarantee $250 billion in financing so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt campus that SoftBank's energy arm is developing in Piketon, Ohio, on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. The full project could cost more than $500 billion, and Nvidia is separately discussing another $350 billion tied to chip purchases. Investor Michael Burry, who is short Nvidia, called the structure circular — a chip vendor guaranteeing its own customer's spending on its own chips.
President Trump announced a major expansion of the federal Ratepayer Protection Pledge, adding more than 200 utilities, data-center developers, cooperatives, and states to a commitment the White House says now covers about 80 percent of the power delivered to US homes and businesses. The core promise is that data-center operators — not ordinary customers — pay for the new generation and grid infrastructure their AI campuses require, whether they use that power or not. Duke Energy, among the participating utilities, launched a "Customer Protection Plus" framework; chief executive Harry Sideris told CNBC that a 15-year deal with a single one-gigawatt data center could save its other customers roughly $1 billion — though the utility cautioned that means bills rise less than they otherwise would, not that they fall.
When a power line failed near Washington on July 22, the grid should have recovered in seconds; instead it took more than ten minutes, because roughly 3.1 gigawatts of data-center load — about three percent of the regional grid's demand — disconnected almost at once and swung voltage from Northern Virginia to Chicago. Twice the size of a similar 2024 event, the incident exposed a reliability risk that is the flip side of the affordability fears behind this week's federal ratepayer pledge — two faces of the same data-center power crunch. Proposed fixes include staggered disconnection rules, campus-scale batteries that ride through disturbances, and ride-through mandates already appearing in Texas.
A new BloombergNEF forecast projects US data centers will draw nearly 200 gigawatts of power by 2035 — about 20 percent of the nation's electricity, up from under 6 percent today and roughly four times current demand. The estimate is 83 percent higher than the firm's December projection, driven by a wave of giant AI campuses, more than a quarter of them larger than 500 megawatts. "Every coal plant, every gas plant, every solar farm in the US — one unit of energy out of five generated by them is going to data centers," one BloombergNEF analyst said.
Construction-robotics startup Gritt left stealth with $34 million in total funding, including a $26 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures. Its AI controls off-the-shelf robotic arms and skidders to unload, carry, and place solar panels with sub-millimeter precision. An eight-person crew using the systems installs 3,000 to 4,000 panels a day versus about 800 by hand, and Gritt has contracts to help deploy 2.8 gigawatts of solar over eighteen months. The founders say the robots also cut worker injuries on hazardous outdoor sites.
Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order barring new permits for data centers that draw 50 megawatts or more, making New York the first state to pause the AI build-out. The freeze holds until the state finishes an environmental review of energy demand, water use, and noise — a process expected to take about a year. Projects that already hold permits are exempt, and a proposed Grid Acceleration Fund would make operators help pay to upgrade the aging power grid.
A new SemiAnalysis analysis argues the US grid simply cannot add capacity fast enough for AI. Data-center demand is set to climb from 21 gigawatts in 2026 to 84 gigawatts by 2030, while net-new firm capacity is barely 15 gigawatts a year — turning available headroom negative across several regions by 2027. The firm projects that behind-the-meter generation — power plants built on-site, bypassing the grid — will supply well over half of new US data centers from 2028 on, because gas-turbine and interconnection lead times now stretch four to six years and on-site power is both faster and more certain.
Chevron signed a 20-year agreement to supply natural-gas-fired electricity to a massive Microsoft AI data center planned near Pecos in West Texas. The project, called Kilby, would start generating power by 2028 and scale to 2.67 gigawatts — enough for more than 530,000 homes — with a first phase estimated at about $7 billion. Chevron is building the plant with Joulent, an energy firm backed by Engine No. 1, and will make a final investment decision later this year. It is the latest sign that AI's power appetite is reshaping where and how electricity gets built.
In a unanimous vote, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered the six largest US grid operators to justify or rewrite the rules that govern how AI data centers and other big power users connect to the transmission system. Operators have 30 days to report available capacity and 60 days to defend their regional rates, with data centers footing their own interconnection costs. The orders speed up connections but leave the deeper problem untouched — there still is not enough generating capacity, and data-center demand is on track to nearly triple by 2035.
A Gallup poll released this month found that 70 percent of Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their local community, including 48 percent who say they are *"strongly opposed."* Half of opponents cite excessive use of resources — 18 percent each name water and energy use specifically — while another 16 percent cite pollution and noise. Two-thirds of supporters cite economic benefits, mostly local job creation. The first national survey of public sentiment on the issue lands as Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced moratorium legislation, Maine's legislature has passed and then watched a governor's veto kill a construction ban, and protests have escalated from Tremonton, Utah, to Monterey Park, California — a sign that the *"AI is good for jobs"* pitch is not yet outweighing local concern about water, grid, and noise.