Spending dipped for two quarters after ChatGPT — then went vertical.

What the four companies report spending each quarter on data centers, chips and the buildings around them. Flat for a year, a brief wobble, then more than four-fold in three years. The latest quarter alone: $166 billion.

The electricity grid repriced.

PJM runs the power market for more than 67 million people across 13 eastern states and DC. It pays power plants to be ready when needed. For seventeen years that readiness price swung between $16 and $174 — then it rose 9.3x in a single auction, and a price cap has bound the three auctions since, the last two coming up short of the reliability target. Utilities pass wholesale costs into bills — estimates for the first repriced year ran 1.5–5% (PJM figures via WHYY). Wisconsin and most of mid-America are on other grids, where this exact price doesn't apply.

Reading the units: MW and GW measure power being used at one moment; TWh measures energy over time. 1 GW = 1,000 MW.

America, drawn only by its data centers.

Every dot is a real mapped facility — no outline underneath; the buildings draw the country themselves. Dots are one size: a small site and a gigawatt campus look alike, and the map is a floor, not a census (an industry database counts 3,000+). The dashed region is the Bakken oil field, where gas is burned off around the clock next to an energy-hungry buildout — our framing, the numbers are theirs. Crusoe, a company that began by running computers on that flare gas in 2018, now builds OpenAI's Stargate campus in Texas.

A seventh of humanity uses it every week — by OpenAI's count.

ChatGPT went from launch to 1.2 billion weekly users in under four years — user accounts, as OpenAI states them, not verified unique people. Employers, meanwhile, have named AI as the reason for 120,136 announced US job cuts this year — their stated reason, which is not the same as net jobs lost.