In the last two quarters, capital spending on AI has blown past all U.S. consumer spending. Investments in AI infrastructure have already eclipsed the telecom and dot-com booms. The top tech companies are pouring so much money into computing power that they may be single-handedly propping up an economy wobbling under chaotic tariff policy.

Gigawatts of new data center requests are flooding utility interconnection queues. And while the numbers are big, the uncertainty is even bigger. Which projects are real? Which are just phantom projects? And how do you plan a grid for a future where half of all new U.S. load could come from data centers by the end of the decade?

In this episode, recorded live at Latitude Media’s Transition-AI conference in Boston, Stephen Lacey talks with two experts watching the boom from different angles: Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies; and Anuja Ratnayake, an emerging technologies executive at the Electric Power Research Institute.They break down the scale of the AI-driven demand surge, the challenges of forecasting in a speculative market, and the implications for utility planning.

Registration is now open for the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas next January. Power Resilience Forum 2026 is the premier event on grid resiliency, bringing together leaders from across the power sector to address the new realities of planning and operating the grid in an era of extreme weather and wildfires.

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Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.