Jackie Snow

It ran in quarts on September 15th.

Jackie Snow wrote it.

And it opens by telling you the data centers powering artificial intelligence are eating the electrical grid alive.

So you're supposed to picture some server farm in Virginia with a bib on eating your electricity with a knife and fork.

Is that just routine economics? More demand leads to higher price? Or is it a choice somebody made about who pays?

My colleague Jackie Snow asked about the same thing.

Here's a clip of her interview with Gernot Wagner, an energy economist at Columbia Business School.

The big question at the end is, in fact, who is able to negotiate the contracts that are favorable to them long term.

and so we've intentionally overbuilt essentially to manage those moments we want some flexibility we want some headroom in the system we're never going to get to 100 utilization or anywhere new there but given the fact that we're really only using about half the capacity in the grid at any given hour of any given day on average there's a lot of extra room for growth if we think about unlocking that untapped potential.

Jackie Snow has been reporting this story for Quartz.

She covered AI for a decade, which, as she puts it, makes her an energy reporter now.

I asked her what exactly Slack on the Grid means.