"At the end of 2024, Texas' grid operator had 63 GW of large new customers in its queue. By this June, that figure reached 474 GW, more than five times record peak demand." "Then Texas hit pause." "Developers routinely spam requests across several sites, and many are speculative builds with no customer yet." "Planners can't tell which are real, and they don't want ratepayers covering upgrades built for projects that never show up." "Fully connecting a large data center can take 5 to 10 years... Idle GPUs cost far more than the electricity to run them, so speed matters most... That's why developers are planning to bring their own power on site." "Full reliability for these power islands is very, very hard, but some labs and hyperscalers have shown that, forced to choose between reliability and speed, they'll pick speed." "Every site I'm aware of intends to connect to the grid as soon as it can, chiefly because on-site power almost always costs more." "AI companies have pledged to pay their way, and most would rather connect to the grid than avoid it. It seems ideal for everyone that we let them do so instead of driving that spending into private islands." "Texas created the energy fast lane first; now it has the opportunity to show us a better one, and I expect it will. Power is where America finds out whether it can still build." a16z's @rmcentush on why Texas is making data centers wait: https://www.a16z.news/p/why-texas-is-making-data-centers