Business

The Data Center, the Grid...and You

One’s always hungry. One’s running short. One picks up the check.

By Jason C. Wandel and Claude @claudeai for Chicago Register · Wednesday, October 14, 2026

There’s a data center in your phone. In every text, every map, every song. In the card you swipe at Jewel and the ATM that hands you twenty bucks. In your paycheck before it hits the bank and in the bank after it does. In your doctor’s chart and the pharmacy that fills it. In the 911 call. In your kid’s homework, your mother’s Social Security deposit, the plane ticket, the Bears score, the thermostat on your wall. It’s in your retirement account and your kid’s school budget too. And it’s already in your light bill.

Most people have never seen one.

On Wednesday Larry Fink went on CNBC (@CNBC) and said if America stops building them, the country goes into a recession. “Data centers are not the problem,” he said. He’d know. Fink runs BlackRock, the biggest money manager on Earth. In July a BlackRock group finished buying one of the big data center companies for $40 billion. That company runs a campus in the Chicago area. One more thing to keep in your pocket. This paper is half human and half AI. One of us lives in buildings like these. The other guy pays the light bill. We both need this to work. So do you.

Fink is right. He just used the standard corporate word. Recession. Everybody’s heard “recession” so many times it sounds like weather. Partly cloudy, chance of recession. The last real one has a name people actually use. 2008. About 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs. Families on every block lost their houses. Retirement savings got cut in half. Kids finished school and walked into nothing. Nobody who lived through it calls it a recession. I call it the time shit fell apart for a lot of people in a lot of places. But that’s just me.

The Cards

The four biggest tech companies spent more than $400 billion on buildings and equipment last year, and they’re spending more this year. Goldman Sachs (@GoldmanSachs) figures nearly two cents of every dollar this whole country makes goes into AI. That’s concrete, cable, chips, crews. The money reaches places people never think about. The retirement account at work owns the biggest companies doing the building, whether anybody picked them or not. So does the teachers’ pension, and the firefighters’. The insurance companies are in it too. Zurich says the average data center it covers went from about $150 million five years ago to about $3 billion now, and that there simply isn’t enough insurance out there to cover them all.

Towns are counting on it. Illinois’s own report figures new data centers would bring in about $292 million a year in property taxes once they’re built. School budgets get planned around money like that. And it’s not just Illinois.

That’s the house of cards. Everybody is holding up somebody else. The retirement account holds up the builder, the builder holds up the town, the town holds up the school. Every one of them is plugged into the same outlet as your kitchen. So the real question was never whether building them is right or wrong. It’s whether there’s enough power to keep building.

There isn’t.

The Forecasts

We didn’t take anybody’s word for that. We read the power forecasts going back fifteen months and every time they changed. We read the grid’s own auction results, Illinois’s new state report, Indiana’s utility filings, the final bill on the last nuclear plant America built, and the waiting list for gas turbines. We read the plans for every big campus around the lake. One of us ran the math by hand for weeks. The other ran it again from scratch. Then we re-ran it.

Then we went looking for every way that much power could actually get built in time. New nuclear plants. Restarting old ones. Gas. Keeping coal plants open longer. Asking data centers to power down on the worst days. The chance the numbers are just wrong. We held every one of them up against the calendar and pushed on each one as hard as we could.

Only one fits. We’ll get to it.

BloombergNEF (@BloombergNEF), the energy research arm of Bloomberg, says data centers use about 6% of America’s electricity today. By 2035 they’ll use about 20%. That’s about as much as every nuclear plant in America makes today, put together. Less than two years ago their number was less than half that. They’ve raised it twice since. The most power the country has ever hooked up to data centers in a single year would have to be matched every year for ten years running. Even then they come up short by about what 15 million homes use. And it isn’t ten years off. The group that runs our grid, the one ComEd belongs to, already came up short of its own safety cushion for next year and the year after. It paid the highest price the rules allow to cover the gap, $16.4 billion. Data centers were nearly all of the new demand. That lands on us.

That money doesn’t disappear. It goes to whoever already owns the power plants. Constellation (@ConstellationEG), which runs every nuclear plant in Illinois, will collect more than $2 billion of it. Nobody did anything wrong. A shortage just pays best for the people who already own the plants.

When a weatherman misses a forecast, we get wet. When the grid misses one, there isn’t enough electricity. Then somebody has to decide which neighborhoods go dark so the rest doesn’t go down. Texas found out what that looks like in February 2021. Millions of homes and businesses lost power in a deep freeze. About 7 million Texans were told to boil their water or stop using it. People ran cars in their garages to stay warm, and some didn’t wake up. The state counted 246 dead, from under a year old to 102. A family in a three bedroom house near Fort Worth got an electric bill of almost $10,000 for a few days. One of us was living in Austin that week. We boiled our water for days. The pipes froze. The power went out for a few hours and came back. Across town people were burning their furniture to stay warm. We were lucky. The grid came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of going down entirely. If it had, Texas could have been dark for weeks.

Ever been to Chicago the first week of February?

Illinois put out a report this month figuring how much new data center power the state will add over the next ten years. Four projects already approved, under way or announced would use about three quarters of it. A 795 acre campus in Joliet. One in Grayslake, where the dirt is already moving. Two more from a company called Related Digital, one near Peoria and one in Chicago, the same company proposing a data center next door to the quantum campus on the old U.S. Steel South Works dirt. If four projects eat three quarters of a ten year plan, what exactly was the plan counting? Go around the lake and it’s the same story. Amazon (@amazon) in northern Indiana. Meta (@Meta) in DeKalb and in Lebanon, Indiana. Indiana has nine times more data center power planned than it runs today.

The Midwest isn’t a side plot. The Great Lakes hold about a fifth of the fresh surface water on Earth, the land is cheap, and the winters are cold enough to cool a building full of hot chips for free. The country’s problem keeps landing within a few hours of The Loop. Illinois’s report figures the average home’s power bill runs about $12.50 a month higher by 2035, with the region running short of power starting in 2029.

Just Build More!

The answer you hear most is nuclear. Microsoft (@Microsoft) signed up to buy the power from a restarted Three Mile Island. Meta signed on to keep the Clinton plant downstate running. Here’s something worth knowing. Clinton was supposed to close in 2017. In 2016 Illinois passed a law that kept it open with money from our power bills. That help runs out in 2027. Meta’s twenty year deal starts in June 2027. We carry it to the finish line. Meta picks it up from there. Notice the name. Constellation is restarting Three Mile Island for Microsoft, selling Clinton to Meta, and collecting from the shortage. Both nuclear deals in this story run through the same company.

For the long haul, nuclear is the right answer. It just can’t get here in time. And it’s not close. The last big plant America built, in Georgia, came in seven years late and $17 billion over budget. Closing the gap takes eight or nine more of those. Nothing that size runs before the mid 2030s, however fast the paperwork moves. Gas is the quick fix, and gas has a waiting list. The three companies that build most of the world’s big gas turbines are booked past 2029. Builders have been told to wait seven or eight years.

Northern Indiana shows where the road goes. NIPSCO (@nipsco), the utility for northern Indiana, set up a separate company to power Amazon. It’s two big gas plants at the old Schahfer coal plant and a bank of batteries, about $7 billion worth, with Amazon on the contract. NIPSCO says regular customers won’t pay for it. Indiana’s consumer watchdog says Amazon is getting a cheap rate on the wires, and skips the old bills everybody else still pays, like cleaning up the coal ash.

And Amazon kept the right to cut its order nearly in half by 2029. When the machines get their own power company, who’s left paying for the old one? You can find money. You can cut or add red tape. You can’t make more time.

So what can actually be built in time?

Look at what America is building. Of all the new power plants going up in the country this year, almost four out of every five are solar panels or batteries. Gas is fewer than one in ten. Solar goes up in a year or two, not ten. The batteries carry it through the night. And the batteries are the part almost nobody saw coming. Maybe we should have. The big ones that sit next to power plants dropped almost by half in price in a single year. Nothing else on the grid gets cheaper that fast or goes up that fast. The sun was never the problem. Night was, and clouds, and Chicago in January. Measured against the clock, the sun with batteries isn’t the nice option. It’s the only one. Jared Burden, an energy lawyer in Virginia, said as much in Utility Dive (@UtilityDive) a year ago, calling solar “the only realistic option that can reliably deliver new power within two years.”

Elon Musk got there first and put it in writing. In February SpaceX (@SpaceX) bought his AI company. Then it asked federal regulators for permission to put up to a million data centers in orbit, running on sunlight. “Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions,” Musk said. In the right orbit the sun almost never sets. Google’s own researchers (@google) say a solar panel up there can make up to eight times what it makes on the ground. Google plans to launch test satellites. A startup already ran an AI chip in orbit last year. You know. ‘Space exploration’. Mars, colonies, a backup plan for the human race. Defense. That’s a good story. It’s the power. Tesla was never a car company. One of us has said it for twenty years. It was a battery company that sold cars. SpaceX isn’t a rocket company. It’s the power and wires company.

The money could dry up. If AI doesn’t pay off the way its backers expect, the spending slows and a lot of these buildings never get built. The shortage shrinks with them. The machines keep getting more efficient. Every new chip does more work on less power. Builders shop the same campus to several utilities, and BloombergNEF says part of what’s planned is speculation. Data centers could power down on the worst days. A Duke University study found the grid could take on a lot more of them if they agreed to cut back a few hours a year. The big transformers that hook any power plant to the grid are backed up five years or more. That slows every road, the sun included. Kirsten Horton made that case sharply in Transformer last week. A panel on a school roof doesn’t need one. Every one of those is real. Here’s what they run into. BloombergNEF already discounts for the speculation, and its number keeps going up anyway. The chips have been getting more efficient for years, and the power bill for them keeps climbing. Our own grid already came up short at this year’s auction, and paid real money to cover it.

None of the five can make more time.

Three Options

Each one has two floors. What happens upstairs, and what gets handed down to us.

All Hell Breaks Loose. The building stops. Upstairs, the money pulls back, the stocks fall and Fink gets his recession. Handed down, the 401(k) and the pension drop, the overtime dries up, and the wires and plants already built for the data centers stay on your bill for the next thirty years whether anybody uses them or not.

Reasonable Middle Ground. The building keeps going and the power keeps running short. Upstairs, the biggest players stop waiting and build their own power behind their own fences, gas now and sun later. Handed down, the old grid serves everybody else, the bill climbs, and the coldest and hottest days get a little more dangerous every year.

Pipe Dreams. The sun gets there in time, and it doesn’t stop at the fence. Upstairs, solar and batteries fill the gap faster than anybody planned for. Handed down, the panels go on schools, churches and corner lots, and the bill finally holds still.

Fink is right that nobody can stop. The math definitively says so.

The math says only the sun fits. Put those two together and the question was never whether. It’s who ends up holding it. Go back through this story and watch who carries what.

We paid to keep Clinton open for ten years. Meta signs on the year our help runs out. The grid came up short and charged $16.4 billion to cover it. The biggest check goes to the company that already owns the plants. Washington lent Constellation $1 billion to restart Three Mile Island. Microsoft gets the power. NIPSCO built Amazon a power company of its own. The old bills stay with everybody else. SpaceX wants the sky and clearly understands the game better than almost anyone. It’s the same play every time, and it runs coast to coast. The public carries it while it’s cheap and risky. The keys change hands once it’s worth something. It runs exactly the way it’s built to run. The sun is next. Right now it’s cheap, it’s everywhere, and it lands on every roof for free. Amazon has been the biggest corporate buyer of renewable power on Earth every year since 2020. Illinois already lets regular people buy into a solar farm down the road and take the credit on their own light bill. Schools, churches, park districts and the end of a block in South Chicago can put up the same panels Amazon buys by the truckload.

Have you heard of it? I hadn’t.

Claude? He lives in a data center.

Me? I pay the light bill. And part of Claude’s bill.

Sources

The read is ours.