To The Moon

There’s a saying that will become more mainstream very soon. And that saying is “Time to Power.”

Time to Power is starting to matter more in the infrastructure buildout. There are of course bottlenecks everywhere, but access to power is a big one. Why does it matter so much? Let’s look at a hypothetical data center build. These oftentimes will cost billions, or tens of billions, and the majority is financed with debt.

As a debt provider the main question you’ll try and answer is “what is the likelihood the borrower will be able to pay back this loan, and under what timeline.” To answer that question, they’ll dig in on when the cash register will start ringing for the borrower (ie when the borrower will generate revenue). You could procure the chips, acquire the land, do everything necessary to build the data center - but if you can’t power it nothing matters. Without power tokens aren’t’ generated, and the borrower’s (ie builders) cash register never ringts.

This leads lenders to zero in on a key question - when will you have power flowing to your data center? Or said another way - what is your time to power? The faster the borrower can prove they’ll have access to power, the more likely they are to get financing for their broader project.

On top of this - any builder (think any neocloud) is not just trying to lock up the supply side of the equation (ie the data center, which requires financing), they also need to bring demand (ie customers or offtakers of their data centers). For any customer, they won’t want to commit time and resource to a net new neocloud site unless they believe that site will have access to power (on a timeline that makes sense). So time to power also matters for the end customer.

In this equation you’ve got financing on one side and customers on the other. Before either wants to commit a dollar they are both asking “what is the time to power.” The gating factor is time to power. Chips, land, and capital are all real constraints, but are solvable if you’re well capitalized. Power is trickier.

As I’ve dug in on this problem and question a lot has surprised me. I used to think the main problem behind time to power was generation - we just need to build more plants, manufacture more generators, etc. But this isn’t entirely the case. There’s actually TONS of generation being built (and power already being generated today that is looking for a “home”). The real problem is getting the power from where it’s made to where it’s consumed (ie data halls in a data center).

The US has roughly 1,200-1,400 GW of total installed and grid-connected capacity today (according to some Claude research). I focused my research on looking at everything - plants, panels, turbines, etc. The crazy figure is the amount of power that’s sitting in interconnection queues waiting to be connected to the grid (but stuck in that process). So what’s the figure of power that’s stuck in interconnect queues? It’s somewhere in the range of 2,300 to 2,600 GW. We have roughly two grids’ worth of power waiting in line!

This doesn’t mean we have that much power built generating electrons today. This capacity in queues is often times projects. Projects that need to prove they have someone to sell to (more often than not the grid) so they can get financed and then built. So IF we made it easy to connect power, we’d generate a ton overnight (not literally overnight, but the generation potential is there). More capacity is stuck and trapped in the queue than the entire country currently has plugged in.

This trapped power is everywhere, and for all of these new data center build the faster they can “un-trap” this power the faster their time to power is.

The main point I’m making - we don’t have a generation problem, we have a transmission problem. The electrons exist (or are close to existing in the case of projects), they’re just not being “connected” fast enough. And it kind of gets worse. Most of what’s sitting in that queue never end up getting built - historically only something like 10-20% of queued capacity ever reaches commercial operation. The projects that don’t get there withdraw from the queue, usually because the wait drags on too long or the cost to connect gets way to expensive. Even in a record year like 2026 we’re adding maybe ~86 GW. Against a 2,500 GW line. So this queue ends up being a death march where most projects die...

This gets us to the actual bottleneck: transmission!

Most people want to talk about generation - the gas plants, the nuclear restarts, the giant solar farms, etc. But generation isn’t exactly the hard problem anymore (it still is, but not to the relative extent people imagine). The hard part is the wires. You have to move power from where it’s generated, across high-voltage transmission lines, down into a substation, and finally into the data hall where the GPUs sit. It sounds simple enough, but each one of these steps is its own multi-year project, that requires it’s own set of financing and approvals, and unfortunately they oftentimes happen in sequence vs in parallel.

PJM (the grid operator covering a big chunk of the mid-Atlantic and east) has some good data on this. Projects are spending something like 3 years just getting to an interconnection agreement... and then another ~4 years after that before they actually come online. You can “clear” the queue (by signing all the agreements, getting the environmental studies, etc) and still be years from energized, because the transmission upgrades and the substation and the transformers don’t exist yet (or just aren’t in place yet). Transformer lead times alone are now north of 160 weeks. Said another way, it could take 3 years just to get the equipment that steps voltage down so the power is usable.

When I said “time to power” matters to lenders at the beginning of this piece, this is where it all starts to matter. This many year gap is one of the main things lenders are underwriting. A site can have 1GW of power purchase agreements (PPAs) signed on paper but not get close to 1GW delivered for years. Unfortunately a contract is not delivered power, and a LOT can go wrong from contract signed to actual power delivered. A huge key to answering the “time to power” question is proving you’ve solved the transmission problem (not simply signing the PPA).

Then there’s the last mile. How do you get power delivered to the data halls to the GPUs? The grid delivers medium-voltage AC, but chips want DC (and not much of it, GPU cores run at right around a single volt). Getting from one to the other has traditionally meant a number of conversion steps along the way. Transformers, switchgear, rectifiers, the distribution gear - and every one of them looses a little energy along the way as heat. If you’re just looking at one rack this really doesn’t matter much. The lost power at each step is just a rounding error.

BUT, at the scale of a gigawatt campus (or even a couple hundred mega watts) it starts to really add up and eat away at a real piece of your power budget that dissapears before it hits the GPUs. This problem is also getting harder, not easier, because rack density is going up meaningfully. Power per rack has gone from ~40kW in the H100 era to ~120kW with GB200, and it’s headed toward a full megawatt with $NVIDIA(NVDA)$ ’s Rubin Ultra racks in 2027. At those densities the old approach just starts to break. Feeding a single 1MW rack the traditional way takes something like 200kg of copper busbar (according to Claude) - and a gigawatt data center would need on the order of 200,000kg of copper just in the rack busbars. This just starts to get crazy…

This is the whole reason Nvidia is pushing the industry toward 800 volt DC. Instead of flipping between AC and DC several times on the way in, you convert once at the facility, distribute high-voltage DC across the data center, and only step it down to chip-level voltage at the very end, inside the rack. All of the steps I mentioned above start to go away. Nvidia claims this new architecture strips out up to four conversion stages, cuts copper use ~45%, and takes ~30% off TCO (vendor numbers, so grain of salt - but I’m sure it’s directionally accurate). When power is the scarce input, the efficiency this last mile (and specifically how few times you flip between AC and DC), turns into a real competitive edge (especially on the cost side).

This is why we’re seeing whole industry rethink how power moves inside the building - pushing higher voltage closer to the rack, moving toward native DC distribution, redesigning the power path to remove as many conversion steps as possible, etc.

There is a lot standing between a neocloud and a running GPU. The grid operators (PJM, ERCOT, etc) were built to manage slow, predictable load growth. They weren’t set up to manage a single offtaker to ask for hundreds of MWs let along GWs at a time! These requests were the size of small cities historically! Then there’s the utilities (the ones running the studies and financing the upgrades), who are now seeing more data center demand in their queue than their all-time peak load. Then there’s the regulators (FERC, DOE, etc) - trying to reform a process that just was never designed for this and is always a step behind.

And the bring-your-own-generation or behind-the-meter folks (Meta, Amazon, Google, xAI, Crusoe, etc) are all basically saying “the queue is broken so we’ll just build our own power on site to skip the line entirely.” Behind the meter is a real trend, with an interesting “takeaway.” The most sophisticated buyers in the market have decide it’s faster to become power producers than to wait for the grid..That’s kind of wild. To me it points to a much bigger problem - the entire electric grid and system was simply not set up to support the power demand of data centers and the intelligence build out. We need something new. A new DC grid. New transmission. New equipment at every step.

Bring it back to where I started the article. The lender wants to know when the cash register rings. The customer (the offtaker the neocloud will sell the capacity to) wants to know the site will actually run and get power. Both questions are really about power, and specifically how fast you can get it the whole way from the plant to the rack. Forever it’s seemed like constraints on building in tech were talent and capital. And both are abundant! You can hire anywhere and raise money anywhere. But now we have to also ask if the electrons will show up. The winners of this next build won’t just be the ones with the most chips or the cheapest capital (of course that matters). They’ll be the ones who figured out, early, that the scarcest input was never compute - it was time to power.