According to TechCrunch, a Wood Mackenzie analysis shows Trump administration permitting changes and withdrawn federal support have already canceled 7 gigawatts of generation on federal land in 2026. Another 92 gigawatts of clean power projects across federal and private land now face cancellation, along with more than $121 billion in energy investment.
Power demand is climbing after years of flat growth, and AI data centers are the main driver. Slowing new generation means tighter grids, higher utility costs, and concentrated leverage for whoever already owns generation capacity. The U.S. can't build AI infrastructure faster than it builds the electricity to run it.
Washington talks AI leadership as if it's all chips and models. The real bottleneck is transformers, interconnection queues, and whether a power plant gets approved before the next server campus breaks ground. Make electricity harder to build, and the winners are incumbents with existing generation. The losers are everyone promising cheap, abundant compute by 2035.
Filed to the Technology desk · Jun 29