Your favorite AI chatbot might be sucking up so much energy that your local factory can’t afford to keep the lights on.
April 10, 2026
Original Paper
Thermodynamic Crowding Out: Empirical Evidence of Energy Cannibalisation in US Capacity Markets (2024-2026)
SSRN · 6263699
The Takeaway
As AI data centers demand massive amounts of electricity, they are driving up power prices so high that physical manufacturing can no longer afford to operate. We are effectively choosing to power virtual assistants over the strategic industries that build our physical world.
From the abstract
<p><span>The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and hyperscale data centre infrastructure is precipitating a novel form of resource scarcity in United States electricity markets. This paper analyses load forecast data from the PJM Interconnection (2024–2026) to test the hypothesis of "Thermodynamic Crowding Out" – the structural displacement of physical industrial capacity by virtual computational load within a physically constrained grid. We identify a statistically significant div