Data Centers Are Easy to Build. Powering Them Is Complicated, Slow, and Expensive
On Wednesday the power flickered in homes from Washington DC to Chicago. The cause was a data center disconnecting from PJM — a massive power grid that connects 13 states including North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Michigan, a span that covers 67 million customers. That hardware is housed in data centers, and data centers demand shocking amounts of electricity.
- ▪On Wednesday the power flickered in homes from Washington DC to Chicago.
- ▪The cause was a data center disconnecting from PJM — a massive power grid that connects 13 states including North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Michigan, a span that covers 67 million customers.
- ▪That hardware is housed in data centers, and data centers demand shocking amounts of electricity.
4 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 3 days. Coverage spans 3 points on the political spectrum — 1 centre, 1 lean right, 1 right.
- ▪ Data centers, power and how to be a winner in the AI Boom — TechRadar
- ▪ How to Build a Data Center — The Free Press
- ▪ DeWine Takes Action on Data Centers — Daily Signal
404 Media files mainly under tech. We currently carry 55 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/data-centers-power-energy-grid-epa-clean-air-act/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:03:50 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T14:13:06.765Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T14:13:06.765Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | DsRt5_uatDSz · 4 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
On Wednesday the power flickered in homes from Washington DC to Chicago. The cause was a data center disconnecting from PJM — a massive power grid that connects 13 states including North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Michigan, a span that covers 67 million customers. The incident points to a larger problem with the compute warehouses fueling the AI boom: It’s physically and economically impossible to build power infrastructure fast enough to meet the demands of AI data centers and when problems occur, everyone will pay the price.AI requires massive amounts of computer hardware to scale. That hardware is housed in data centers, and data centers demand shocking amounts of electricity. More data centers mean more demand on the grid which raises the costs of energy for everyone.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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