DOE funds grid resilience
The U.S. Department of Energy announced a $10.5 billion GRIP program to accelerate grid resilience, grid telemetry, and AI-enabled transmission upgrades that underwrite energy-critical sectors including data centers reported. That funding materially lowers one of the main infrastructure risks Morgan Stanley flagged as AI compute ramps up reported.
DOE has already awarded roughly $7.6 billion from the GRIP program across 105 selected projects that reach all 50 states and the District of Columbia energy.gov. The Grid Deployment Office launched the Speed to Power initiative on Sept. 18, 2025 to accelerate multi-gigawatt generation and transmission projects specifically to meet AI and data‑center electricity demand growth energy.gov. On March 12, 2026 the Office of Electricity issued an approximately $1.9 billion Notice of Funding Opportunity to accelerate reconductoring and other Advanced Transmission Technologies, framing the effort as a means to expand capacity for rising demand from AI and data centers energy.gov; the NOFO appears on DOE’s funding portal as DE‑FOA‑0003580 with application milestones listed on the Infrastructure Exchange (e.g., LOI/CP/FA dates) infrastructure-exchange.energy.gov. Morgan Stanley’s analysis projects a cumulative 47 GW shortfall in U.S. data‑center power for 2025–28 (up from a prior 44 GW estimate), a gap the DOE’s Speed to Power and reconductoring NOFO are designed to address ca.investing.com, and seven hyperscalers including Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI and Amazon signed a March 4 Ratepayer Protection Pledge to fund or procure the additional capacity and grid upgrades needed for AI data‑center growth whitehouse.gov.
