Trump Declared a National Emergency Over the Power Grid. I Had Questions.

On August 26, 2026, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency involving the United States power grid.

That got my attention.

Not because I spend my free time reading about electrical infrastructure. I absolutely do not. But “national emergency” is one of those phrases that makes me want to know what exactly we're calling an emergency, why we're calling it that now, and what happens once we do.

So I read the order.

Technically, it's about something called the bulk-power system, which is basically the big electrical network behind the electricity we use every day. Think major power lines, transformers, generators and other equipment that helps move electricity across large parts of the country.

And according to the White House, there's a problem. Actually, according to the White House, there are several. The administration says America depends too much on certain power-grid equipment made in other countries. It says that creates a security risk because foreign-made equipment could potentially be tampered with, remotely accessed or disrupted. There's also a much simpler concern: if we depend on another country to make something we absolutely need, what happens if one day we can't get it?

Okay.

That's what they're telling us.

But one thing I've learned over the years is to believe none of what you see and half of what you hear. And that applies to everybody. Companies. Politicians. Government agencies. Your cousin nem. Everybody.

So when the White House tells me this is the problem, my next question isn't automatically, “Okay, what are we going to do about it?”

My next question is:

Is that the whole problem?

Because declaring something a national emergency is a pretty big move. I want to know what happened before the declaration, what evidence supports it, what changes because of it, who gets new authority, where the money goes and who might benefit from whatever happens next.

And while I was reading, one particular part of the order made my eyebrow go up.

The White House specifically mentioned the rapid growth of data centers and artificial intelligence when explaining why America's need for reliable electricity is becoming more important. It also mentioned advanced manufacturing and defense production. In regular-person English, we're building a whole lot of new stuff that needs a whole lot of electricity.

But AI?

How did we get from asking ChatGPT to fix an email to artificial intelligence showing up in a national emergency about America's power system?

That's where I started digging.

Before I went any further, I wanted to separate two things: what the president says is happening and what I could actually verify is happening. And yes, America really does have problems getting some of the equipment needed for the electrical grid. Take transformers. You don't need to know exactly how a transformer works. I certainly didn't wake up planning to become an electrical engineer. The important part is that transformers are essential pieces of the system that gets electricity from where it's produced to where it's needed. And some of them are getting difficult to get.

Utilities and developers have been warning about transformer shortages and long wait times for years. Reuters reported this year that some large transformers can take as long as four years to get, while prices have risen dramatically. American manufacturers haven't been able to meet all of the demand, which means utilities and developers have increasingly looked overseas for equipment.

So that's a receipt.

The equipment problem didn't suddenly appear because Trump declared an emergency in August. It was already here. In April, four months before the emergency declaration, Trump signed another action saying America's ability to make major grid equipment was “dangerously limited.” He authorized the government to use the Defense Production Act to help increase American production of transformers, substations and other equipment.

Now we're starting to get a timeline.

America already needed more grid equipment. Some of it was taking years to get. We weren't making enough of it ourselves. In April, the federal government moved to help increase domestic production. Then, in August, the president declared dependence on certain foreign-made grid equipment a national emergency. That doesn't automatically tell me there's something nefarious happening.

But it absolutely makes me ask:

What changes once we call it an emergency?

Because the August order doesn't just express concern. It gives the federal government more power to block certain foreign-made equipment, place conditions on equipment that's already here and steer federal purchasing toward equipment considered secure and, where possible, American-made.

And that's where my side-eye starts warming up.

If America is about to spend enormous amounts of money rebuilding and expanding the electrical grid, I want to know who gets approved to sell the equipment, who gets pushed out, who receives government support, who gets the contracts and who was already positioning themselves for this buildout before anybody called it an emergency.

But before I could even get to the money, I ran into something else.

Gary, Indiana.

On August 11, a severe storm tore through northwest Indiana. Winds in Gary reached 99 miles per hour, trees came down, power lines were damaged and hundreds of thousands of NIPSCO customers across the region lost electricity. This wasn't a little thunderstorm. The damage was serious.

But nearly two weeks later, some people in Gary still didn't have power. And even after the lights started coming back on, residents were still dealing with fallen trees, huge branches, damaged equipment and debris.

That's when I came across a video from a woman in Gary. She was basically asking a very simple question: Who is responsible for cleaning this up? The lights were back on. NIPSCO had apologized. The cameras had come and gone. The articles had been written. But she was standing there looking at a tree still sitting on a power line more than two weeks after the storm.

And I couldn't stop thinking about that video while I was reading about the urgent need to prepare America's electrical system for the future. Because before we start talking about the grid we're going to need for AI, I have questions about the grid people are already paying for.

And apparently, Indiana's governor had questions too. Governor Mike Braun called for state regulators to investigate NIPSCO's storm response. But he didn't stop at asking why restoration took so long. He also wanted regulators to look at whether the utility had properly maintained trees and areas around its equipment before the storm and whether money that had already been approved for infrastructure and reliability improvements was actually spent the way it was supposed to be spent.

👀

Now we're talking.

Because nobody needs to convince me that 99-mile-per-hour winds can knock the lights out. Of course they can. My question is what condition the system was in before those winds arrived. Was the infrastructure properly maintained? Were trees and vegetation managed the way they were supposed to be? What improvements had customers already paid for? Were those improvements actually completed? And if not, why not?

Those questions matter on their own. But they matter even more when Washington is telling us America urgently needs a massive new round of electrical investment.

Most of us experience artificial intelligence through a screen. You type something into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, hit a button and something comes back. It feels almost weightless. But there's a whole physical world behind that little box.

AI needs powerful computer chips. Those chips go into servers. Those servers have to live somewhere, so companies build enormous data centers. Those buildings need cooling systems, internet connections and, most importantly for this story, electricity.

A lot of electricity.

The cloud has an electric bill.

And that bill is getting big.

The International Energy Agency, or IEA, is an organization that studies how countries produce and use energy. According to its projections, data centers could be responsible for about half of the increase in America's electricity use through 2030.

Half!

And because I'm not accepting anybody's giant scary number just because they put it in a report, I wanted to know whether anyone else was seeing the same thing.

They are!

Utilities are already reporting large new electricity requests from data centers. Federal regulators have been changing rules to deal with huge new users trying to connect to the grid. And some proposed AI data centers could use as much electricity as a small city.

So again, there's a real issue underneath all the government language. The question isn't whether data centers use a lot of electricity. They do. The more interesting question is what we're about to do because of it.

This is where the whole story started getting strange to me.

Technology companies can build data centers faster than the country can necessarily build all of the power infrastructure needed to support them. A data center might take a few years to build. Major electrical projects can take much longer. And remember, some of the equipment needed for those electrical projects is already taking years to get.

So we're trying to build more AI data centers while simultaneously trying to build more power plants, transmission lines, substations and transformers to keep those data centers running. At the same time, we're trying to manufacture more of that equipment inside the United States because the government says depending on foreign suppliers creates a national-security problem. That's a whole lot of building. And a whole lot of building means a whole lot of money.

Which brings me right back to Gary.

Because when I hear that America needs hundreds of billions of dollars in new infrastructure, I don't only want to know how much more money we need. I want to know what happened to the money we've already spent. That's not an argument against investing in the grid. If the grid needs work, fix the damn grid.

But Gary gives us a very real reason to ask what “investment” actually looks like after the press release. Did the promised improvements happen? Did reliability actually improve? Was maintenance done? Who was responsible when it wasn't? And when customers are asked to pay more for the next round of upgrades, how do we know that money will produce what they're being told they're buying?

That's a Side-Eye question!

And we're going to need a lot more of those questions, because the amount of money moving into AI infrastructure is getting enormous.

Companies are already spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers and buying the equipment that goes inside them. The IEA says the planned expansion has gotten so expensive that companies increasingly won't be able to pay for everything themselves. More of the money will have to come from borrowing, investors and other financial arrangements.

And that's when my questions changed again.

Who's lending the money? Who's borrowing it? Who's guaranteeing it? Who's getting government incentives? Who's building the facilities? Who's selling the equipment? And if everybody is betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI demand keeps growing, what happens if those bets don't work out the way everybody expects? But there was another question I couldn't shake. Everybody keeps talking about which AI company is going to win.

OpenAI.

Google.

Microsoft.

Meta.

Amazon.

But every one of those companies needs physical computing power.

So instead of asking which AI company wins, I started asking:

Who gets paid while everybody else is fighting to win?

And one company kept showing up.

Nvidia.

At first, that seemed pretty simple. Nvidia makes the chips everybody wants. Everybody wants AI. AI companies need chips. Nvidia sells a shitload of chips and makes a shitload of money. Got it. Except then I started looking at who Nvidia was selling to.

And who Nvidia was investing in.

And who was borrowing money to buy Nvidia equipment.

And who was guaranteeing what.

And who Nvidia itself was paying.

That's when this stopped looking like a simple story about a company selling very popular computer chips. And started looking like a Gordian knot made out of octopuses. So that's where I'm going next. Because I started this investigation trying to understand why artificial intelligence was sitting inside a presidential declaration about America's power grid.

Now I'm looking at billions of dollars moving between chipmakers, AI companies, data centers, banks, investors, utilities and the federal government. And I have considerably more questions than I started with. Which, around here, usually means we're getting somewhere.

I started with a national emergency.

Somehow I ended up reading Nvidia's financial statements.

Carolina Lux
Professionally nosy.