Everyone's asking if AI will take their job. Almost nobody's asking what happ...

Everyone's asking if AI will take their job. Almost nobody's asking what happens when the AI goes dark.

Texas just gave us a preview. Governor Abbott (who called the state "the epicenter of AI" less than a year ago) froze all new data center hookups to the power grid. The waiting list had reached 474 gigawatts, more than five times the state's all-time record demand. Almost all of it is data centers.

Here's the part the headlines skip. That's the grid Texas deliberately keeps walled off from its neighbors, so it stays out from under federal regulation. Ars Technica put it plainly back in 2021: the state "lacks extensive integration with those of the surrounding states." That choice has a bill attached. When Winter Storm Uri knocked roughly 30 gigawatts of generation offline in February 2021, Texas couldn't import its way out of the hole. Days of rolling blackouts. People died.

So the AI boom is racing to build on a grid whose defining trait is that it stands alone, and it already fell over once this decade.

I'm not anti-data-center (we need the compute, and plenty of these projects will be fine). But this is a clean lesson in something I push on with clients: dependency evaluation. Every serious operation runs on a stack of things it doesn't control: a vendor, a model, an API, a grid. The discipline isn't avoiding dependencies. It's asking, before you lean harder on one: what happens when this has a bad day, and can I route around it?

It matters more when the dependency is propped up. Texas hands data centers over a billion dollars a year in tax breaks, with a projected $3.2 billion revenue hit over the next two years. So the people making the bet aren't the ones holding the risk. When your electricity bill or your tax base is quietly subsidizing someone else's infrastructure, you've taken on a dependency nobody asked you to sign for.

So before you wire AI deeper into your business, answer the question everyone's skipping. What is it actually running on? Who's on the hook when it goes dark? What's your move if the vendor changes the model, the terms, or the price?

If you can't answer that, you don't have a plan. You have a hope.