The Hum

How America’s Broken Grid Could Lose the AI Century

The hum starts before the sun. It comes through the drywall like breath—low, constant, a vibration behind the sink pipes that never goes silent. Mustafa Kaya says it sounds like a ship anchored outside his bedroom. He knows it’s not: it’s the rooftop diesel stacks of a hyperscale data center just beyond the fence line. Still, the metaphor holds.

His youngest stopped sleeping through the night. His wife gets migraines again, the kind she hadn’t had since they lived near the airport in Frankfurt. The noise wasn’t in the real estate listing.

Kaya’s town in Northern Virginia isn’t just a suburb anymore—it’s part of what insiders call “Data Center Alley.” Tech companies call it proximity to fiber. Locals call it sprawl. And when Dominion Energy proposed a new loop of high-voltage towers to reinforce the grid, neighbors packed the HOA clubhouse waving maps with red lines arcing over soccer fields and cul-de-sacs.

“We’re not opposed to data centers,” Kaya said that night. “But they shouldn’t break our lives to exist.”

The future we ordered showed up in someone’s backyard. And the lights don’t always stay on.

In the winter of 2025, a polar vortex clipped the mid-Atlantic and sent heating demand surging. Kaya’s kids huddled in the living room under blankets while alerts scrolled across their phones. The lights flickered again—barely enough to reset the microwave clock. Down the road, another diesel truck delivered backup fuel to the server facility. The hum, though, never stopped.

“We’re not out of electricity. We’re out of the ability to move it.”

That same January, PJM—the nation’s largest power market—hit its capacity auction price cap. Grid planners once projected energy demand to grow at one percent annually. Now, the Energy Information Administration expects record consumption in 2025 and 2026. Almost all the new load comes from AI and crypto. PJM anticipates 32 gigawatts of additional demand by 2030—30 from data centers.¹

“We built generation. We forgot the roads.”

But the roads aren’t just a metaphor. Until this year, there was no federal requirement to plan long-range transmission. FERC’s new rule forces grid operators to think twenty years ahead and share costs across states.² The Department of Energy says we must double regional capacity and build cross-country corridors by 2035 just to break even.³

Even that depends on a cascade of ifs—permitting, supply chains, and whether construction can outrun the next peak demand.

Meanwhile, we’re already wasting power. California curtailed record solar in 2025.⁴ In the Plains, wind farms idle their blades for lack of transmission. In New England, tight gas supply sends oil-burning plants back online. The grid is greener than it was a decade ago—but not green enough. And nowhere near fast enough.

In Kaya’s neighborhood, the HOA petitioned Dominion to bury part of the new loop. They were worried about stray voltage, about proximity to schools. The answer was simple: too costly, too slow. Burying the line would delay the substation needed for the next cluster of hyperscale tenants.

“Renewable power on paper isn’t clean if it never leaves the substation.”

Across the South and Mid-Atlantic, utilities have defaulted to natural gas—not because it’s cleaner, but because it gets built. Steve Lasker, a senior executive at Dominion, calls it “grid realism.”

“When your interconnection queue is ten years long and your customers need power in two,” he told me, leaning back in his chair, “gas is the only tool that works.”

Lasker’s realism has consequences. Transformers can take more than 100 weeks to replace. Distribution upgrades lag behind population growth. And backup generation, once a precaution, now guarantees uptime.

At 2 a.m., diesel trucks idle outside the compound, brake lights glowing through Kaya’s blinds. His wife pulls a pillow over her head. Even as neighbors circulate real estate listings and swap names of soundproofing contractors, permits are issued for another three-story data vault two blocks over. The HOA objects again. The result is the same.

“I’ve got neighbors thinking about selling,” Kaya says. “But where do you go? It’s like this everywhere now.”

That sense—that there’s no opting out—isn’t just a homeowner’s anxiety. It’s systemic.

Globally, data center demand is on track to more than double by 2030—exceeding the size of Japan’s entire grid.⁵

In the U.S., hyperscalers are adapting faster than the grid. Microsoft is contracting for small nuclear.⁶ Amazon and Google are building wind-battery hybrids.⁷ Sam Altman is investing in micro-reactors.⁸ Not because they want to disrupt public utilities, but because they’ve run out of other options.

While Kaya’s lights flicker, China lays wire.

The State Grid Corporation of China will spend $89 billion this year alone.⁹ It has already completed 38 ultra-high-voltage lines connecting inland wind and solar bases to coastal cities.¹⁰ Their transformer production lines move twice as fast. Permits clear in months, not years.

“China planned. We permitted.”

That’s how Renee Koh, a Department of Energy planner, put it. She toured China’s grid facilities last fall. “They build for the load they know is coming,” she told me. “We treat future load like a budget fight. They treat it like inevitability.”

One Chinese UHV line can carry as much power as twenty Hoover Dams.¹¹ The U.S. has built none.

Capacity isn’t debated there—it’s deployed. That inversion, where energy infrastructure leads rather than follows, creates a structural advantage the United States hasn’t matched in a generation.

In America, infrastructure is a morality debate. In China, it’s a budget line.

Back home, McKinsey projects the world will need $6.7 trillion in new data center capacity by 2030.¹² Kaya sees none of it. His utility bill ticks upward. His power blinks. His kids whisper when the lightbulbs buzz, afraid another blackout is coming.

The U.S. grid doesn’t fail all at once. It fails by missing breakfast.

“America doesn’t lack engineers. It lacks alignment.”

We reward apps over infrastructure. Utilities favor returns over resilience. Political cycles smother planning.

In China, priorities align at the national level. In America, we outsource them—and fight about who’s responsible.

Now Altman and Musk are pitching self-contained microgrids to feed AI ambitions. But that’s not a solution. It’s a workaround. Grids exist because they’re better than silos. They balance load. They absorb shock. They scale collectively.

More wires. More routes. More foresight.

That’s what Kaya thought he was buying into—a stable home, clean power, civic infrastructure. Not flickering lights at bedtime. Not a six-year-old asking if the robots took their electricity. Not a low, constant hum behind the drywall that never stops.

The hum isn’t just sound. It’s a signal.

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Bibliography

1. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook: March 2025, March 12, 2025. Summary of projected U.S. electricity demand surge.

2. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Order No. 1920: Long-Term Regional Transmission Planning, May 13, 2024. Rule requiring 20-year planning horizons and cost-sharing.

3. U.S. Department of Energy, National Transmission Needs Study, October 2023. Report detailing required transmission capacity doubling by 2035.

4. California Independent System Operator (CAISO), 2025 Solar Curtailment Report, April 2025. Curtailment totals reached historic highs.

5. International Energy Agency (IEA), Data Centers and Energy: Global Outlook, February 2025. Global projection for data center load.

6. Microsoft Corp., “Announcing Fusion Partnerships for AI Workload Energy,” company blog post, July 2025.

7. Amazon and Google press releases, “Grid Modernization Initiatives,” February 2025. Wind and battery integration commitments.

8. The Atlantic, “Sam Altman’s Nuclear Play,” May 2025. Reporting on Helion and other micro-reactor investments.

9. Bloomberg, “China’s State Grid Plans $89 Billion in 2025 Energy Projects,” March 2025.

10. China Daily, “UHV Transmission Lines Strengthen China’s Grid,” September 2024. Overview of UHV buildout.

11. U.S. Department of Energy, “Hoover Dam Output Facts,” accessed 2025. One Hoover Dam produces ~2 GW; Chinese UHV lines carry 40+ GW.

12. McKinsey & Company, Global AI Infrastructure Needs, April 2025. $6.7 trillion data center estimate by 2030.