The grid is sweating. Not metaphorically. Literally. Artificial intelligence is pulling current like a deadlift, and the American electrical system is discovering what happens when twentieth-century infrastructure meets twenty-first-century compute. Data centers rise in months. Transmission lines take years. Consumers feel it in their bills. Utilities feel it in their inboxes. Washington feels it in the quiet panic behind words like competitiveness and security. This is the pressure in the room before anyone ever steps on stage, and it is now unmistakably tech news.
On February 25 at 9:00 AM ET, Washington Post Live puts a microphone in front of that pressure and lets it talk. Not as a policy seminar, but as a public reckoning over whether the United States can power the next chapter of artificial intelligence without pricing out the people who live here. This is where energy stops being a background utility and starts acting like the main character in the AI story. When power becomes narrative, it stops being niche and becomes tech news with consequences.
The timing matters. Executive orders are signed. Federal land is opened. Permitting clocks are being smashed with a sledgehammer labeled urgency. Data centers are no longer just real estate. They are national assets. The question hanging over the room is simple and brutal. Can power move fast enough to keep intelligence from moving elsewhere. This is the strategic layer of tech news, where infrastructure decides competitiveness.
The conversation centers on Varun Sivaram, CEO and Founder of Emerald AI, a company named like a promise and operating like a dare. Emerald AI is not trying to build more wires. It is teaching the wires to listen. Turning data centers from grid bullies into grid collaborators. Load that flexes. Demand that responds. Power that behaves less like a fixed expense and more like a living system.
Varun Sivaram arrives with a résumé that reads like a map of this moment. Former State Department clean energy leadership. Former Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Ørsted. Now founder backed by NVIDIA, with an advisory orbit that includes Gina Raimondo, John Kerry, Jeff Dean, Fei-Fei Li, John Doerr, and Malcolm Turnbull. Chief Scientist Ayse Coskun brings the academic steel. This is not theory. This is execution dressed in policy language, the kind that quietly reshapes tech news cycles months before outcomes are obvious.
The deeper signal is what Emerald AI represents. A shift from scarcity panic to optimization ambition. If artificial intelligence can train itself, maybe it can train the grid too. If compute is the hunger, flexibility is the diet plan. This reframes the argument away from who pays and toward how systems behave under stress.
Washington Post Live is not hosting a conference. It is hosting a mirror. Energy leaders, policymakers, investors, and operators will see their own constraints reflected back at them, only sharper. The grid does not care about talking points. It cares about load, timing, and physics. So does the future of artificial intelligence.
