K.R. Sridhar

The utility companies tried to provide them the power.

But remember, it's a freeway and a highway paid for by the ratepayer.

And if one ratepayer was consuming all that power and everybody else was paying the tolls for that road, people got upset.

They are out because people are worried about multiple things.

The first thing is the grid simply cannot support gigawatt data centers.

The grid was not built to be able to do that.

The grid was a flywheel.

that was supposed to take care of a lot of retail customers.

If you are one single large customer that's going to suck up most of the electricity coming from a substation, whether you're an aluminum smelter in the past, whether you're a glassmaking factory, they all depended on their own on-site power.

Bring your own power.

Right.

So these big data centers today consume a lot more power than even those aluminum smelters.

And for them to have naively thought that they can rely on the grid for that kind of power was wrong.

Doomed to fail.

Doomed to fail.

And at some scale, it was going to break.

But even before that happened, the utility companies tried to provide them the power.

But remember, it's a freeway and a highway paid for by the ratepayer.

And if one utility

rate payer was consuming all that power and everybody else was paying the tolls for that road, people got upset.