Powering AI is an architecture problem
MIT Technology Review reports that a July 22, 2026 transmission-line fault in Ashburn, Virginia—the world’s largest data-center cluster—knocked more than 3 gigawatts of load off the grid in seconds, and notes a related 2024 surge-arrester failure that dropped about 1,500 megawatts across roughly 60 facilities. The piece argues that such grid and data-center vulnerabilities highlight broader architectural challenges in reliably powering large AI workloads.