AI data centers are sprouting up across the United States at a rate not seen since fro-yo took over strip malls in the 2000s. And their staggering growth is causing alarm that the country’s power grid doesn’t have the electricity capacity to absorb them without breaking.

At a major energy conference in Houston last week, the No. 1 agenda item—of all things—was artificial intelligence, with leaders including Bill Gates warning that the top constraint to AI development was finding sufficient power sources to feed data centers.

How we got here

Over the past few decades, US demand for electricity has been pretty flat. But the horizontal chart went fully vertical as the excitement around AI set off a land grab for data centers, which are massive buildings housing the computing infrastructure that trains large-language models, like the one behind ChatGPT.

• Earlier this month, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison boasted that he’s building an AI data center that could fit eight Boeing 747s nose to tail.

The power problem: Airplane hangar-sized data centers training AI systems require “exponentially more power” than traditional data centers, per the Washington Post, causing utilities to dramatically upgrade their demand projections.

• Oregon’s Portland General Electric just doubled its forecast for new electricity demand in the next five years.
• Georgia now predicts 17x more demand for industrial power than recent estimates. “This has created a challenge like we have never seen before,” the chairman of Georgia’s electricity regulator told the WaPo.

It’s not just data centers straining the grid. The US is experiencing a historic explosion of factory investment as a result of the Biden administration’s manufacturing subsidies, gobbling up power supplies. Crypto mining, too, is taxing the US’s aging power grid.

Big picture: As tech giants like Amazon and Meta scour the US for cheap and plentiful electricity, many worry it could come at the expense of climate change goals. States concerned about meeting demand have proposed dozens of new gas-fired power plants to feed data centers’ insatiable appetite for electricity.—NF

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Russia mourns concert victims as Putin alludes to Ukraine. Russia held a day of mourning for the 137 people who were killed in a terrorist attack on a concert venue Friday, and Russian President Vladimir Putin said authorities had arrested the four gunmen suspected of carrying out the assault. The Islamic State took responsibility for the massacre, though Putin did not mention the group in his speech to the nation; he did claim the gunmen were caught as they were fleeing to Ukraine, which Ukrainian leaders said was intended to falsely implicate them in the attack and shift the blame. US National Security spokesperson Adrienne Watson said, “ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack.”

NBC’s Chuck Todd blasts his bosses for hiring former RNC chair. After stepping down from her role leading the RNC this month, Ronna McDaniel was hired by NBC as a paid contributor—and her past support of lies about election fraud in 2020 is not sitting well with the network’s journalists. Following an interview with McDaniel on Meet The Press, former host Chuck Todd joined the show to criticize NBC execs for hiring McDaniel and said it put reporters in an uncomfortable position. He told current host Kristen Welker, who conducted the McDaniel interview, “I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract.” NBC seems to have no plans to reverse its hiring of McDaniel despite its journalists’ frustrations, WaPo reported.

Trump’s bond deadline is here. New York’s attorney general could begin seizing Donald Trump’s assets if he doesn’t put up a nearly half a billion-dollar bond by today. When he lost a civil fraud trial last month, Trump was ordered to pay $464 million, but after being rejected by 30 companies for a bond, his lawyers claimed securing one was a “practical impossibility.” He’s asked an appeals court to reduce or push back the bond requirement ahead of today’s deadline. That’s not the only New York legal predicament Trump finds himself in today: A judge could set a trial date for his criminal hush-money case.

Commercial supersonic air travel hasn’t existed since the Concorde’s final flight in 2003. But the dream of slicing travel times in half by flying faster than the speed of sound could soon be a reality, thanks to the efforts of a handful of companies.

On Friday, one of those companies—Boom Supersonic—said its XB-1 prototype jet completed a successful test mission over the Mojave Desert. The prototype will ultimately make way for Overture, a full-sized plane that would become the first commercial supersonic aircraft since the Concorde. Boom said it’s locked in orders or preorders of 130 jets to major airlines, including United and American.

Despite the progress, barriers remain for Boom to be commercially viable:

• Founder and CEO Blake Scholl says the company has raised $700 million but could need up to $8 billion to complete Overture.
• Supersonic flights burn more fuel than standard flights, raising sustainability concerns.
• Regulations prevent sonic booms over land, which means flights from the US to places like Tokyo would be the only ones benefiting from the extra speed.

The good news: Technological advancements could allow for noisy sonic booms to become quieter sonic “thumps,” allowing for continental flights that can get you to your destination so fast that you can’t finish watching The Batman before landing.—DL

Last chance to invest before this company redefines smart living. What if you could have invested in the biggest electronics products as they launched into big-box retail? Distribution deals with Best Buy led Ring and Nest to billion-dollar acquisitions, and the up-and-coming smart-home company RYSE is mirroring their playbook. Their Smart Shade tech just launched in 100+ Best Buy locations—and you can still participate in their growth.

Sam Bankman-Fried will be sentenced in Manhattan on Thursday. The fallen crypto star convicted of fraud will find out just how long his stay in prison will be this week. Criminal sentencing guidelines call for the FTX co-founder to receive a sentence of 100 years, although prosecutors have called for a sentence of 40 to 50 years. SBF sees things much differently, and his lawyers have suggested 6.5 years is enough to ensure their client has learned his lesson after his more than 1 million victims lost more than $10 billion upon the collapse of FTX.

SCOTUS hears abortion pill case: Access to mifepristone, a pill used to end early pregnancies, is on the docket on Tuesday in a high-stakes case that’s expected to be decided upon in July—right in the thick of election season. The mifepristone question wound its way up to the Supreme Court after a Texas judge suspended the pill in 2022, citing the FDA’s approval process, though a subsequent ruling allowed the drug to stay on the market. Medication abortions have become increasingly prevalent, now accounting for two-thirds of all abortions in the US.

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter drops Friday. When the superstar released Renaissance a year and a half ago, she said it was the first of a “three-act project”—and the second act is upon us. With her hit single from the forthcoming album, “Texas Hold ’Em,” she became the first Black woman to reach the top of Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.

Everything else…

• Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, takes place Monday. Streets in India, Nepal, and other South Asian countries will be filled with revelers throwing colored powder and launching balloons in the air as they celebrate love and rejuvenation at the start of spring.
• The men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments resume this week with the Sweet 16 rounds. The men are back in action Thursday; the women tip off again on Friday.
• The markets are closed on Good Friday. Easter is Sunday.

Stat: A Formula 1 car is a complicated, expensive piece of machinery requiring the utmost precision. So you can imagine the shock in early 2023 when the new bosses for Williams learned that the ~20,000 car parts in the race team’s workbook were cataloged in…Microsoft Excel. “The Excel list was a joke. Impossible to navigate and impossible to update,” team principal James Vowles told The Race. The superannuated tracking system led to all kinds of confusion with parts showing up late or being mislabeled, which sometimes resulted in workers spending the night at the factory in an attempt to get everything right.

Quote: “I’ve hired the best defamation law firm in the country, and I will sue The Washington Post if they publish a false story about me.”

Kim Mulkey is about to become the first person you think about when someone mentions the Streisand Effect. In an attempt to discredit a story that’s been two years in the making and has yet to be published by WaPo, the LSU women’s basketball coach read a threatening, defensive statement on Saturday ahead of her team’s attempt to repeat as champions. Mulkey called the story she had not yet read a “hit piece” and questioned the timing of an interview request submitted just as LSU was set to play in the NCAA tournament, although she admitted the Post’s reporter asked to speak to her for the past two years.

Read: A very close look at the DOJ’s antitrust case against Apple. (Hardcore Software)