A surge in electricity demand tied to AI and data center expansion has put substantial new pressure on the United States’ aging power grid. Critics warn that the immediate effect could be higher electricity bills and that, over time, the strain might contribute to outages or other technical failures.
At TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this month, several industry leaders argued that the same influx of connections and load is also creating momentum for grid modernization. Apoorv Bhargava, founder and CEO of WeaveGrid; Tim Heidel, CEO of Veir; and Kristin Eberhard, vice president of policy at Rewiring America, said the challenges come with opportunities to update how the grid is managed and built.
"It’s a very different electric grid, right?" Bhargava said. "We’re dealing with a ton of new variables, including renewable energy. We’re dealing with a ton of new load in the form of electric vehicles and data centers and heat pumps, and the ability to manage and orchestrate is fundamentally what utilities are now grappling with."
WeaveGrid focuses on software to orchestrate and manage load so utilities can derive more value from existing assets. According to Bhargava, the company’s software helps organizations deploy energy more efficiently while optimizing connections to reduce utility customers’ bills.
Veir, led by Tim Heidel, is addressing physical infrastructure and efficiency. The company develops superconducting power lines that it says can transmit power five times farther than traditional cables while occupying 20 times less space. Veir announced earlier this month that it raised $110 million in a Series C funding round.
"The scale of the investment in AI infrastructure is driving a tremendous amount of innovation," Heidel said. "There’s a ton of new technologies that are coming off the shelves and starting to get to scale that, pulled together, can actually really make sure that data centers are the best community neighbors and citizens they can possibly be." He added that rapid adoption of these technologies is important to ease the next stage of growth.
Kristin Eberhard of Rewiring America, which advocates for household electrification, said the spike in data center energy demand has heightened urgency for modernization and created a willingness across sectors to try new approaches.
"I feel like this era of AI and load growth is a very improv era," Eberhard said. "There’s a lot of yes-and-ing going on. So yes, we need more transmission lines. Yes, we need more centralized power plants, and we also need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of all this other stuff that we had previously been leaving on the table when we didn’t have this urgency of the AI demand."
Why it matters
Speakers at the event argued that while AI-related demand increases the short-term burden on the grid, it is also accelerating investment and deployment of both software-based load management and hardware upgrades like superconducting cables. Combined, these measures could improve utilization of existing infrastructure, reduce consumer costs, and lower the risk of long-term outages if they are adopted quickly and strategically.
