Who Runs the Power Grid: Humans or Robots?

In The Matrix, robot overlords keep our minds occupied in a metaverse-on-steroids so they can use our bodies as batteries. Always a dubious plot device — world-conquering machines don’t get thermodynamics? — it nonetheless raised a question pertinent to the current panic about data centers developing artificial intelligence and eating the electricity grid: Who’s in charge here, the machines or us meat-batteries?

The AI narrative has taken on an air of inevitably, epitomized by the $3.2 trillion stock market valuation of chipmaker Nvidia Corp., as well as once-moribund merchant power stocks. Forecasts for data centers’ electricity consumption have spiraled, with some now projecting 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2030, equivalent to a quarter of the grid’s entire load today.