One fallen wire, one big data center in the dark

A single power line dropped in Northern Virginia and the lights went out at a nearby AI data center. It was a close call — the kind of thing you don't notice until it happens to you. The incident exposed how fragile the grid is for the growing number of data centers that are eating up power in one corner of the state.

The article doesn't just report the outage. It lays out what's wrong — data centers are built for reliability, but the grid around them isn't keeping up with their appetite — and how to fix it. The fix isn't a silver bullet; it's a set of changes to how the grid is planned and paid for so it can handle more load without the whole thing buckling.

Why this matters for us: when the lights go out on these places, the tools we depend on go dark too, and the fix has to start with the grid, not the buildings.