AI buildout isn't bottlenecked by electricity supply—it's the grid interconnection queue

What's slowing down the AI buildout

The U.S. has enough electricity, but connecting a new data center to the grid now takes a median 55 months, up from under 20 months in 2005. The $40B+ Stargate campus in Texas will draw 1.2 GW at peak—equal to 313,000 homes. Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman have each said energy access is the real limiter. The bottleneck is a first-come-first-served queue and rigid rules that don't reward plants willing to cover their own short-term power needs.

Why it matters: Strong angle correcting the AI bottleneck narrative from 'power shortage' to 'grid interconnection queue rigidity,' with concrete numbers and the Stargate case. But the source is Works in Progress rather than a tier-1 tech outlet, and the piece is policy/infra analysis rather ...