One Power Outage Brought Down 3 GW of U.S. Data Centers

One transmission line outage in Washington knocked 3.1 GW of Northern Virginia datacenters offline in 30 seconds, leading to a cascading event through the entirety of the PJM grid (Virginia to Chicago). One transmission line outage in Washington led to a cascading event through the entirety of the PJM grid (Virginia to Chicago) as 3.1 GW of datacenter load in the world’s densest region of server capacity came offline in 30 seconds. Voltage fluctuations rippled throughout the PJM grid from Virginia to Chicago — recovery took 11 minutes rather than a matter of seconds.

In 2024, a similar event caused only 1.5 GW of load to go offline. The increasing consolidation of compute into a single geography presents a risk across the industry — and the legacy electrical grid is increasingly showing itself unfit to support the next generation of AI clusters.