Transcription
This one flew under the radar for most people. I'm not surprised if you haven't heard about it, but it's significant. Microsoft announced a partnership with the Midcontinent Independent System Operator to modernize the Midwest Power System.
The integration focuses on weather disruption prediction, on transmission planning, and operational efficiency as electricity demand from data centers surges. Power is now the compute constraint story. We have been talking about the idea that gigawatts and gigawatt stories are driving AI. Well, here we have it.
Hyperscalers aren't just customers from the grid. They're becoming grid stakeholders. Grid planning timelines, interconnection cues, those are now strategic dependencies for AI road maps to serve the demand that we're seeing. And so we should expect in 2026 a new competitive access around grid advantage. So sites, deals, partnerships that unlock power faster are going to become just as valuable for model makers as model performance itself.
And utilities are going to start demanding something back. They're going to demand flexibility. They're going to demand forecasting from the model makers. They're going to demand a degree of demand response from them. And that's going to push data centers toward becoming a controllable load rather than a pure always on load. And companies that figure out how to be good grid citizens are going to have deployment advantages that their competitors can't easily replicate because they're going to get access to power. And so there's a little bit of the industry growing up and becoming a good citizen on the grid that we're starting to see.