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Two days after a gunman tried to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Hilton hotel, Republican lawmakers got straight to work pushing for President Donald Trump's $400 million White House ballroom. 

The president and First Lady Melania Trump were ushered out of the dinner after the gunman pulled a Leeroy Jenkins past security and shot a Secret Service agent near the security checkpoint. 

The moment President Trump was evacuated from the White House Correspondents dinner after loud noises were heard. pic.twitter.com/RnbIumNR3A

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) April 26, 2026

Not only was the security atrocious considering how many high-profile individuals were at the event (where Reagan shooter John Hinckley, who shot Regan there, said it was a dumb place to keep holding high-profile events), Trump was evacuated a full 10 seconds after JD Vance. 

?? WATCH: Trump — escorted by the arms, Vance — grabbed by the scruff

CNN has released footage showing the evacuation of U.S. leadership.

Security forces first escort Vance out, then rush back for Trump. pic.twitter.com/JNyzRa0ftG

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) April 26, 2026

So, great job there.

BUILD THAT BALL(room)

And now, the push to get Trump's ballroom completed... 

"Let’s get it done," Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) said on X, announcing that he would introduce legislation this week and move for unanimous consent of "express approval for construction of a Presidential ballroom" - while over in the House Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) will introduce the "Build the Ballroom Act" and file for explicit statutory authority. 

"While the lawsuits attempting to stop this privately-funded gift to the country are nonsense, last night makes it clear that we need it—and we need it now," he posted on X. "I look forward to Democrats repudiating their violent rhetoric against President Trump by cosponsoring and supporting this bill. Mr. President, build away."

Boebert's on it too - with the Colorado Republican announcing that she 'and her team' are in the process of drafting legislation to guarantee the project's completion.

"I don’t believe congressional approval is required for the project, but if it’ll keep activist judges on the sideline, so be it," she posted on X. "More to come this week."

Even Sen. John Fetterman, who was there on Saturday, (D-PN) is onboard. 

"We were there front and center. That venue wasn’t built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the U.S. government," he wrote on X. "After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these." 

As the Epoch Times notes further, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche also joined the calls to allow the ballroom to go ahead.

“It’s time to build the ballroom,” he posted on social media.

Trump said on Truth Social that the project was ahead of schedule and well within budget, arguing it’s necessary for security purposes.

He criticized a lawsuit by historic preservationists as based on the “passing aesthetic gripe of a single person” that is no justification for delaying a secure facility.

The ballroom project, envisioned by Trump for years as a classical addition to the executive mansion, has faced repeated legal hurdles. A federal judge ruled in March that construction requires explicit congressional authorization, halting above-ground work while allowing limited underground activity to continue. Appeals courts have issued temporary stays, but litigation from the National Trust for Historic Preservation continues.

Trump once offered to fund a ballroom privately during the Obama years but was turned down. Construction moved forward in Trump’s second term after demolition of parts of the East Wing. The administration described it as a privately-financed upgrade needed to bring the White House up-to-date to accommodate modern events.

Architects called the design “classical, beautiful, and long overdue,” as court cases mulled whether the executive branch required legislative sign-off for such a considerable alteration to the historic complex.

Preservation groups contend the project goes around lawful reviews and risks the White House’s historic character. The Justice Department on April 26 asked for the case to be dropped to ensure the safety of the president, his family, and administration officials.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Tuesday destroyed a major Hezbollah tunnel in southern Lebanon on Tuesday evening, minutes after issuing an unusual warning that the blast would be heard across wide areas.

The tunnel is being described in regional media as the largest one ever discovered thus far in the war in southern Lebanon. Israeli N12 News reporter Amit Segal has written that "the force of the explosion caused a small earthquake to be felt along the northern border." The below footage has been confirmed in Israeli media:

The IDF destroyed a massive Hezbollah tunnel; the force of the explosion caused a small earthquake to be felt along the northern border. pic.twitter.com/symjrjk7bT

— Amit Segal (@AmitSegal) April 28, 2026

Very shortly before the huge blast, an alert went out to Israeli communities from Rosh Hanikra to the Golan Heights, forewarning of the large explosion - telling people not to panic.

The tunnel was located near the village of Qantara, which is a heavily Shiite Muslim town. The Israeli ground operation has seen Muslim and Christian villages alike razed to the ground in some instances.

Amid the fragile Iran and Lebanon ceasefires, sirens sounded in the Galilee area just minutes before the planned detonation, reportedly also based on potential inbound aerial threats.

Amazingly, the Times of Israel reports in the explosion aftermath that the "Geological Survey of Israel says the massive controlled explosion was picked up by the seismic warning system. However, no earthquake sirens were activated."

"The military told residents earlier it would ensure that the controlled blast would not set off the earthquake sirens, which has happened in the past," the report adds.

The blast was filmed and photographed even from miles away, where smoke was seen reaching many stories into the air. 

Lebanon has been denouncing such controlled demolition activity, given that in some cases entire villages and abandoned towns have been destroyed in similar fashion.

Israel has sought to utterly raze any village it deems a Hezbollah weapons depot or safe area. But this has also included targeting Christian towns in the south of Lebanon, as the below image shows.

The Christian village of Yaroun in southern Lebanon, before and after it was destroyed by the Israeli army. pic.twitter.com/Rg77dlbuCJ

— Ihab Hassan (@IhabHassane) April 26, 2026

Western media has tended to present these Mideast conflicts involving Israel as coming down to "Jewish vs. Muslim" wars - but the Israeli army doesn't discriminate in terms of also attacking Lebanese and Palestinian Christian enclaves. 

Authored by Jp Cortez via The Mises Institute,

The bulk of the US gold reserves held in Fort Knox are made up of impure “non-standard” bars that don’t qualify for use in international settlements.

In practice, this means that most of America’s massive gold stockpile is illiquid and wouldn’t be readily accepted on the international market should the need arise:

“It’s a decrepit relic just like our monetary policy is. With respect to America’s gold stockpile, we hold ourselves to a lower standard than the rest of the world,” Money Metals CEO Stefan Gleason said.

The French central bank recently sold 129 tonnes of similar non-standard gold that was stored in New York and replaced it with higher-quality bars that will remain in France.

Notwithstanding the lack of any credible physical audits for decades, US gold reserves are reported to be 8,133.5 metric tons. That’s roughly 261.5 million troy ounces. About half of that (147.3 million ounces according to the US Mint) is stored at Fort Knox. The rest is spread out between the Denver Mint, the West Point Bullion Depository, and the Federal Reserve vault in New York.

America’s gold is valued at $42.22 per ounce by statute. The price does not fluctuate with market movements.

According to the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), gold bars must contain 350 to 430 fine troy ounces and have a minimum fineness of 995.0 parts per thousand to be acceptable for international settlements. In fact, the “good delivery” standards across the globe have been transitioning to 0.9999 purity.

Based on documents released during a 2011 House Committee on Financial Services Hearing, however, we find only around 17 percent of the gold bars held by the US government in Fort Knox meet any modern-day purity standards.

Here’s a breakdown of the purity of the gold bars held in Fort Knox:

• Fineness between 899 and 901 – 64 percent

• Fineness between 901.1 and 915.4 – 2 percent

• Fineness between 915.5 and .917 – 17 percent

• Fineness of 0.995 or higher – 17 percent

• The average purity of US gold reserves is 916.7

Problematic Audits, Chain-of-Custody Discrepancies, Missing Records

Keep in mind, we’re operating on guesswork here because the US government’s gold holdings have not been audited since at least the 1970s.

In 1974, the government put together a publicity stunt in the name of an audit. The US Treasury opened just one of its 15 Fort Knox vault compartments to politicians and reporters to view the gold and confirm its existence.

That’s been called an audit. However, none of the bars that were passed around were ever matched to a serial number, assayed or tested for purity, or even verified as part of the United States’ holdings. As Sound Money Defense League Director Matthew Cortez pointed out, “It seems the made-for-TV spectacle in 1974 was more of a pep rally than any credible proof of what the amount of US gold purported to be in those vaults.”

Following the 1974 publicity stunt, the US Treasury says it conducted a multi-year process of opening and inventorying vault compartments and affixing new tamper-evident seals to the doors of each compartment upon completion. However, these so-called audits failed to meet basic transparency or accounting standards.

Some reports have since gone missing, and there is no record of comprehensive assaying, weighing, or transactional history available to the public.

Furthermore, there is evidence that seals on vault compartments have been broken over the years, bars have been moved for unknown reasons, and seals have been re-affixed without fresh auditing. Subsequent annual reviews of the schedules of compartment seals serve only to whitewash the prior discrepancies.

In sum, the US Treasury’s management of US gold reserves is replete with audit “no-nos” that would never pass muster at a responsibly run private depository.

An “audit the gold” bill introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) last year would not only require a comprehensive audit of US gold reserves, including, importantly, an accounting of any transactions involving said gold. It would also require the Treasury to refine all non-standard bars so that they meet modern requirements for international settlements—a process that could take several years.

Why So Much Non-Standard Gold?

How did the US end up holding so many impaired gold bars that are illiquid on global markets?

It is the legacy of US policy that abandoned the gold standard, leaving us with the fiat system we live with today.

Needing to expand the money supply to support his spending plans, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to expropriate the public’s gold and add it to the national reserves. On April 5, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, effectively making private gold ownership illegal.

FDR claimed the measure was to prevent “hoarding.” However, by creating an expansive definition of “hoarding,” the EO was designed to take virtually all gold coins and bars out of private hands and transfer them to the government.

Many people refer to Roosevelt’s scheme as “gold confiscation,” but that overstates what actually happened. The government didn’t go door-to-door taking people’s gold. However, the Federal Reserve still collected plenty of gold, especially gold held by institutions.

But many Americans also turned in their gold voluntarily as an act of obedience. Some likely did so because they trusted the government, others out of a sense of patriotism, and some probably turned their gold in out of fear.

Everyone was paid roughly $20 per ounce for their gold. But six months later, FDR formally devalued the dollar by some 40 percent when he declared gold worth $35 per ounce.

Much of the confiscated gold was in the form of coins that were generally 90 percent pure. At the time, private banks, along with the Federal Reserve, held a large number of coins. That was because Federal Reserve notes were redeemable for gold.

However, with private ownership of gold effectively banned, people would no longer be able to trade paper for metals, and there was no need to hold on to a bunch of coins. The government melted the coins down and formed them into bars, which now sit in Fort Knox vaults (as far as we know).

In a 1994 article published by The Journal of Economic Education, William C. Wood called the Fort Knox depository “an artifact of the gold standard days.”

The gold currently in Fort Knox came from the melting of Depression-era gold coins, from lend-lease arrangements in War II, and from government operations under the gold standard.

Wood specifically noted, “The gold resulting from melting of coinage has considerably lower quality than the ‘fine’ or ‘good delivery’ gold commonly used in international trade. The majority of the gold in Fort Knox is the lower-quality coin gold.”

In some ways, it makes sense that US gold reserves are impure and useless on the international market. It reflects the nature of the fiat system that replaced it.

Mises Institute Editor in Chief Ryan McMaken called the US gold reserves “a legacy of theft and lies,” pointing out that the gold reserve was never intended to be a “static, untouchable hoard of the US government.”

The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Cloudera Inc., accusing the enterprise data and artificial intelligence company of deliberately engineering a hiring process that excluded American workers from at least seven lucrative technology positions while the firm pursued permanent residency sponsorship for foreign workers on temporary visas.

In a 14-page complaint filed with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer, the department’s Civil Rights Division alleges that Cloudera, from March 31, 2024, through at least January 28, 2025, instructed job candidates to submit applications to a dedicated email address, amerijobpostings@cloudera.com, that rejected all external messages with an automated bounce-back error. The company did not advertise the roles on its public careers website or accept applications through its standard portal, as it did for non-sponsorship positions.

Cloudera then attested to the Department of Labor that it could not locate any qualified U.S. workers for the roles, which paid between approximately $180,000 and $294,000 annually, according to the filing. The positions included a Product Manager role in Santa Clara, California, with a listed salary range of $170,186 to $190,000.

The case marks one of the most detailed enforcement actions under the Justice Department’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which was relaunched last year and has already produced 10 settlements targeting employers accused of discriminating against American workers in favor of temporary visa holders.

“Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs.”

On X, she wrote that the department had sued Cloudera “for discriminating against U.S. workers in favor of foreign visa holders for high-paying tech jobs” and warning employers that they are “on notice.”

We just sued Cloudera for discriminating against U.S. workers in favor of foreign visa holders for high-paying tech jobs. This is a violation of the Immigration & Nationality Act, & @CivilRights will not hesitate to sue employers for discriminating against U.S. workers! You are…

- AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) April 28, 2026

A Technical Barrier With Regulatory Consequences

The complaint describes a recruitment system designed to satisfy the letter of permanent labor certification (PERM) rules while subverting their purpose. Under PERM, employers seeking to sponsor foreign workers for green cards must first demonstrate that no minimally qualified, willing, and available U.S. worker exists for the position through good-faith recruitment that mirrors normal hiring practices.

Cloudera posted the seven PERM-related jobs on a state job board, in newspapers, and in professional publications. But it deviated sharply from its standard process by refusing to list the positions on cloudera.com/careers and directing all applicants to the nonfunctional email address.

External candidates received a Google Groups error message stating that the group “may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group.” For at least nine months, Cloudera recorded no external applications through the address and made no effort to investigate or fix the issue. The company nevertheless certified in its PERM applications - under penalty of perjury - that it had conducted bona fide recruitment and found no qualified U.S. worker. No U.S. workers were hired for any of the seven positions during the relevant period.

One Worker’s Complaint Triggers Investigation

The investigation began after a single U.S. worker - the charging party, whose name is redacted - attempted to apply and received the bounce-back message. On January 10, 2025, the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section opened a charge-based investigation. Two months later, it launched an independent probe and concluded there was reasonable cause to believe Cloudera had engaged in a pattern or practice of citizenship-status discrimination, violating Section 1324b of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The complaint brings three counts: deterring U.S. workers from applying, failing to consider applications that were submitted, and failing to hire qualified U.S. workers for positions the company had reserved for temporary visa holders.

Cloudera’s Dual Hiring Tracks

For regular, non-PERM vacancies during the same period, Cloudera advertised positions on its external website and accepted applications through its standard careers portal. Only the PERM-track roles - those intended to be filled through sponsorship of workers already on temporary visas such as H-1B - were funneled through the defective email channel. The filing describes this as a “separate recruitment and hiring process” that treated U.S. workers less favorably based on citizenship status.

Because Cloudera employed more than three workers during the relevant period, they're subject to the anti-discrimination provisions of the INA.

If the allegations are proven, Cloudera could face civil penalties for each individual discriminated against, back pay and interest for affected workers, and injunctive relief requiring changes to its recruitment practices. 

Authored by Guy Birchall via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Department of Homeland ?Security (DHS) said on April 27 that past statements expressing what it labeled extremist views from immigrants applying ?for green cards and naturalization would warrant closer scrutiny.

The DHS statement was in response to a New York Times report over the weekend that, citing internal DHS training materials, said that under new guidance introduced by the Trump administration, immigrants can now be denied a green card for expressing political opinions.

A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which falls under the purview of DHS, said certain ?behaviors and statements “may raise serious concerns for USCIS personnel reviewing an applicant’s file, ?including espousing terrorist ideologies, expressing hatred for American values, advocating for the violent overthrow of the United States ?government, or providing material support to terrorist organizations,” adding that such actions “warrant closer scrutiny.”

The New York Times report claimed that the Trump administration includes criticizing the state of Israel as a potentially disqualifying factor when applying for a green card or naturalization.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said that the administration’s policies had “nothing to do with free speech” and were meant to protect “American institutions, the safety of citizens, national security and the freedoms of the United States,” the paper reported.

The Epoch Times has contacted the White House and DHS for further comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

The New York Times report prompted criticism from lawmakers and rights groups, who have raised concerns regarding free speech and due process.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) labeled the alleged instructions to immigration officers as “outrageous” in an April 27 post on X.

“Trump plans to deny legal residency in the US based on whether he agrees with your speech,” Hollen wrote.

“Since when did it become ‘anti-American’ to criticize the actions of a foreign government? Who is he fighting for?”

Nonprofit civil liberties group Defending Rights & Dissent said the move was an “incredibly disturbing attack on free speech, with the government deciding who can enter the country based purely on their expression of political views,” in an April 27 post on X.

The Trump administration has adopted a harsher line on Palestinian advocacy movements it has deemed anti-Semitic by attempting to deport foreign protesters and threatening to freeze funding for universities where protests were held, since Trump retook the White House in 2024.

Last year, the Trump administration said it would vet immigration applications for “anti-Americanism” and anti-Semitism.

DHS stated on April 9, 2025, that USCIS would consider online expressions of anti-Semitic sentiment—particularly those endorsing violence, or terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests.

The new policy, which went into effect immediately, also applies to physical harassment of Jewish individuals and will affect applicants for lawful permanent residency, foreign students, and individuals affiliated with educational institutions linked to anti-Semitic activity.

The policy directs USCIS officers to treat expressions of support for anti-Semitic violence or extremist ideologies as negative discretionary factors when evaluating applications.

Authored by Tejasri Gururaj via Interesting Engineering,

Global data center power demand is projected to hit 84 GW by 2027—a 50 percent jump from 2023 levels—with AI workloads accounting for 27 percent of that total, according to Goldman Sachs Research.

The grid cannot keep up with AI. For decades, electricity demand grew slowly and predictably, giving utilities comfortable margins to plan capacity years in advance. That model broke almost overnight. Between 2023 and 2024 alone, utilities’ five-year summer peak demand forecasts jumped from 38 GW to 128 GW, a more than threefold increase in a single planning cycle.

Unlike traditional server loads, which are relatively flat and predictable, AI inference and training jobs generate sharp, near-instantaneous power spikes. Large-scale GPU clusters can produce fluctuations of hundreds of megawatts within seconds. That’s a load behavior utilities have no historical model for.

Energy companies are no longer treating hyperscale data centers as large customers to be served from the grid, but rather as anchor infrastructure to be co-built with.

What follows is a look at what that shift actually demands at the systems level — why natural gas is currently the only tool that can fill the gap at the required speed and scale, what that means for emissions commitments already being made today, and what the longer path to balancing this with storage, transmission, and cleaner alternatives realistically looks like.

Why natural gas is filling the gap today

The US currently generates around 40 percent of its electricity from natural gas, with coal and renewables making up most of the rest. However, neither can meet the requirements of AI data centers, which require firm, uninterrupted, gigawatt-scale power available around the clock. The present US grid is already under strain before data centers even enter the equation.

Renewables hit a hard wall here. Interconnection requests for new solar and wind projects face median wait times of over four years. In contrast, natural gas is cheap, abundant, and already flows through an extensive pipeline network across the country. And unlike new solar or wind projects, gas plants can be up and running in three to five years.

Even so, three to five years is not immediate. Demand is here now, and the gap between what the grid can deliver today and what data centers need is already being felt. Energy companies are trying to figure out how to keep up with this demand in different ways.

Entergy is spending $3.2 billion to build three natural gas plants totalling 2.3 GW specifically to power Meta’s new Louisiana data center, which requires 2 GW for computation alone. These plants carry a typical operational lifetime of around 30 years.

Others are hedging their bets that the infrastructure will attract the tenant. NextEra Energy, the US’s largest renewable developer, is partnering with ExxonMobil to build a 1.2 GW gas plant in the Southeast. CEO John Ketchum summed up the industry’s new posture: the AI sector is shifting toward “BYOG” — build your own generation.

Rethinking the engineering playbook

Power grids are engineered for predictability. Seasonal peaks, industrial cycles, and population growth are modeled to plan generation capacity for the future. Fitting AI into this picture requires much more than just scaling.

Training a large language model means thousands of GPUs running simultaneously, sustaining enormous power draws for days or weeks, then dropping off sharply. These spikes are unpredictable and can be extreme. Dispatch curves determine which plants run when, whereas reserve scheduling ensures backup capacity is always available. AI workloads stress both in ways utilities have no historical model for. The forecasting crisis this has created is visible in the numbers, with a threefold increase in peak demand between 2023 and 2024. 

Developers routinely file speculative interconnection requests for projects that never get built, flooding queues with phantom demand. ERCOT, Texas’s grid operator, developed an entirely new Adjusted Large Load Forecast methodology to account for exactly this — the gap between projected data center load and what actually materializes.

At the plant level, this is forcing a redesign of how generation assets are dispatched. When an AI model responds to a user query, it triggers a sudden, large power surge known as an inference spike. Gas peakers — plants designed for short, high-output bursts — are now being co-located with data center campuses specifically to absorb these inference spikes that baseload plants can’t respond to fast enough.

The DOE’s National Transmission Needs Study identified transmission congestion as already acute across multiple regions before this wave of demand arrived.

Transmission and cost crunch

The physical grid is buckling under the same pressure. Transmission investment in many regions of the US declined steadily after 2015, leaving a system already running close to its limits. Now it’s being asked to absorb demand at a scale it was never designed for.

In Texas, CenterPoint Energy reported a 700% increase in large load interconnection requests between late 2023 and late 2024. In Virginia, another 50 GW of data center projects sit active in the queue. The costs reflect the strain.

Combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGTs) capture waste heat to generate additional electricity, making them efficient enough for round-the-clock demand. Installed costs for new CCGTs have nearly doubled to around $2,000/kW compared to plants built just a few years ago.

The market data tells the same story. The capacity market clearing price, which is the rate utilities pay to secure guaranteed power reserves for peak demand, has also increased. In PJM, the grid operator covering much of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, capacity market clearing prices for the 2026-27 delivery year jumped to $329/MW — more than ten times the $28.92/MW price from two years prior.  

The long game : Emission costs

The gas plants being built today aren’t just a bridge to the AI boom; they’re a commitment. With an average operational lifetime of 30 years, they will still be running well past every major net-zero target on the books.

A natural gas plant emits around 490g of CO2 per kilowatt-hour over its lifetime. Scale that across the gigawatts of new capacity being greenlit today, and the emissions math becomes difficult to ignore.

Across the southern US, utilities are planning around 20 GW of new gas capacity over the next 15 years, with data centers accounting for 65 to 85% of projected load growth in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia alone. The methane problem compounds this.

Natural gas infrastructure (drilling, pipelines, compression) leaks methane continuously, both accidentally and through intentional venting. Methane traps around 80 times as much heat as CO2 over a 20-year horizon, making the emissions from a buildout of this scale difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore.

It’s the policy fault line that’s now opening up between energy companies, hyperscalers with net-zero commitments, and regulators who are only beginning to grapple with what AI’s energy appetite actually means for decarbonization timelines.

Policies and incentives

Several structural mechanisms are being put in place to eventually shift the balance, though none of them work fast enough to solve the immediate problem.

It’s the policy fault line that’s now opening up between energy companies, hyperscalers with net-zero commitments, and regulators who are only beginning to grapple with what AI’s energy appetite actually means for decarbonization timelines.

Policies and incentives

Several structural mechanisms are being put in place to eventually shift the balance, though none of them work fast enough to solve the immediate problem.

On the storage side, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offers a 30% tax credit for standalone energy storage systems and zero-emission generation facilities placed in service after 2024. The credit applies not just to generation technologies like solar but also to storage infrastructure itself. This gives data center operators and utilities a financial reason to invest in battery systems needed to make renewables work around the clock.

On the generation side, nuclear is emerging as a leading zero-carbon option for AI data centers, given its ability to deliver firm, always-on power. Google is already moving in this direction, striking a deal with NextEra to restart the 615 MW Duane Arnold nuclear facility for 24/7 carbon-free power.

Transmission remains the hardest problem. A study by the Department of Energy identified significant transmission capacity gaps across nearly every US region — gaps that predate the AI demand surge and will take years of coordinated investment and permitting reform to close.

The path forward

AI’s power demands are arriving faster than the infrastructure built to serve them. The gas plants, the transmission upgrades, the storage credits, the nuclear restarts, none of it is moving at the speed the technology is. 

At some point, that gap has to close. The question is whether that gap closes through deliberate investment and policy coordination, or through something more painful. Power shortages, delayed data centers, and electricity bills that reflect the true cost of building a grid that wasn’t designed for this moment. Engineers and policymakers are working on the former. The clock is running on the latter.