AI's real 2026 bottleneck isn't chips or data - it's megawatts, and the grid can't clear the queue

Materials person's provocation: we argue about model size and chip supply, and the thing quietly capping all of it is the grid. US data-centre demand went from ~23 GW in 2023 to ~42 GW this year. Meanwhile ~2,300 GW of generation and storage sits stuck in US interconnection queues - more than the country's entire installed capacity. PJM now averages years to connect a new load. So hyperscalers are routing around the public grid, buying dedicated gas and nuclear. That tells you where the scarcity is. It was never FLOPs - it's joules delivered to a rack on a schedule, and the unglamorous layer underneath: transformers, interconnects, storage to firm it. Crack storage and interconnect and everything downstream accelerates. What are you seeing on power where you are?