The global power grid is severely congested, with more than 2,500 GW of projects waiting to connect.

In the U.S., the queue of projects has nearly doubled in four years, and the average wait is five years. Nearly 80% of new projects have dropped out of the queue because costs are too high and delays are too long. The EU also has 1,700 GW stuck in the queue, and energy worth €7.2 billion was curtailed in 2024.

The underlying problem is that construction can’t keep pace. Building a power line can take anywhere from five to fifteen years, while wind and solar farms can be built in just one or two. The result is that clean energy can be generated but not delivered.

AI and data centers are making matters worse. An NVIDIA AI rack can draw as much as 132 kW, while a typical storage rack uses less than 10 kW. Forcing both into the same high-end data center is simply a waste of precious grid capacity.

Filecoin took a different path. Its storage network is already up and running, without waiting for approvals or connecting to new power grids. Thousands of independent Filecoin nodes are distributed around the world, putting existing hardware to work. It now has several EiB of capacity at its disposal, providing support for AI training and archival files.

If the power grid is congested and won’t be back to normal anytime soon, why not move storage out of data centers first?