Data centers are devouring the electrical grid. Is a crash around the corner?

Some like to imagine that the digital world has freed us from the physical one, that computing lives somewhere above the friction of pipelines and permits and power lines, in a clean, abstract place we have named, without irony, the cloud. That illusion is dispelled when a transformer shortage causes a delay in the construction of data centers.To give a sense of the amount of energy throughput required to keep building, the following numbers come from federal laboratories and utility research or...