Here's a fact that should make you angry: the wires are half-empty.
The US power grid, the largest machine ever built, runs with enormous capacity held idle at all times. Not because the physics requires it. Because the rules require it. Every line must survive the worst single failure, at the worst possible moment, assuming nobody reacts in time. So planning engineers, decades ago, calculated worst-case limits by hand and hardcoded them into the machine. Forever.
That was the right call in 1975. Reaction time back then was a human picking up a phone. Today we hold terawatts of connection requests in a 5-year queue, tell AI companies to wait a decade for new transmission, and the margin just sits there. Insurance for a world where nothing could think fast.
The market is real. A billion dollars says so.
Last week Emerald AI raised $150M at a $1B+ valuation. They make AI data centers flexible, orchestrating compute against real-time grid conditions so a gigawatt of load can behave like a good grid citizen and connect faster. Honestly, that sounds like a fun problem to work on. Compute orchestration against the physics of the grid? Sign me up in another life. Congrats to Varun and the team.
And I'm happy for a selfish reason too. For years, a few of us have been saying the interconnection bottleneck is a computation problem, not a concrete problem, and that there is a market for grid capacity delivered as software. The official answer was always "build more lines, see you in 15 years." Last week the market priced our thesis at ten figures. The capacity market exists. It's real. It's enormous. That's good for every builder in this space.
That's all I'll say about them. Back to our side of the machine.
Augment the peak
There are two things you can do about a ceiling: live gracefully under it, or move it.
We move it.
The posted limit on a transmission line was never its real capacity. It was its capacity assuming blindness and slowness: assuming no system exists that can see the actual state of the grid and act before a failure cascades. Build that system, and the math changes completely. Know, every second, which contingencies are actually possible right now. Respond in sub-seconds when one happens. Suddenly the real, safe limit is roughly double the posted one. Same reliability standard, enforced continuously by computation instead of guaranteed by idle copper.
That's Splight. The redundancy moves from steel into software. The margin that sat idle for fifty years becomes usable capacity. Loads that were quoted a decade interconnect in months.
Two more companies joined us last week to deploy this in California, a record week for us.
Build
America needs the peak augmented. Not managed, not scheduled, not politely rationed. Augmented. The AI buildout is the biggest industrial project of our lifetime and it is currently rate-limited by numbers calculated before the microprocessor.
We will fix.
Back to work.