AI’s power hunger is remaking California’s grid. The high desert could decide who wins

When people talk about artificial intelligence, they usually talk about software or chips. They rarely talk about transformers, transmission lines and desert land. They should.

Data centers already use an estimated 4% of all U.S. electricity, and federal projections suggest their demand could double or even triple by the end of this decade as AI systems scale up. A single large campus can draw as much power as a mid-sized city. Behind every image generator and chatbot is a building packed with high-performance chips, running around the clock and quietly tugging harder on the grid.

At the same time, California has committed by law to cleaning up its power sector and is moving toward a more integrated Western electricity market that will let power flow more freely across state lines. The state wants to electrify cars, buses and buildings while phasing out fossil fuels.

AI’s invisible footprint on the grid

For decades, electricity demand in the United States grew slowly. Utilities planned for modest, predictable increases. That era is coming to an end.

Data centers are one reason. The digital services we rely on every day—search, streaming, cloud storage—already consume vast amounts of power. AI adds another layer: training and running large models requires dense racks of chips and intensive cooling. These facilities do not flicker on and off with the weather. They pull steady, heavy loads, often 24 hours a day.

In California, this new demand lands on a grid that is already under pressure. The state is pushing drivers toward electric vehicles, encouraging heat pumps and electric appliances in homes, and trying to keep the lights on during wildfire smoke, heat waves and drought. Meeting all of that demand by running gas plants harder or building new ones might ease short-term reliability concerns, but it would make the state’s climate goals far harder to reach.

So the core question is no longer whether AI will increase electricity demand. That is already happening. The question is where we build the clean generation to meet it and how we move that power to where it is needed.

That is where geography – and land – start to matter.

The Antelope Valley as a power platform

One of the most important places to watch is the Antelope Valley, the high-desert basin that straddles northern Los Angeles County and southern Kern County.

For much of the last century, the valley was known for aerospace testing, agriculture and bedroom communities. Over the past decade, it has become something else: a major center for solar power. Large photovoltaic projects now cover thousands of acres. One of the best-known early plants, Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One near Lancaster, spreads millions of panels across roughly 2,100 acres and can generate enough electricity for tens of thousands of homes each year.

The Antelope Valley has three crucial advantages.

First, sunlight. The region’s high elevation and many clear days give it some of the strongest solar resources in the state.

Second, wires. High-voltage transmission lines already cross the basin, tying it into the grid that serves Los Angeles and other population centers.

Third, growth. New housing, logistics hubs and light industrial sites are expanding in and around the valley, bringing both local demand and attention from planners and investors.

Taken together, those features turn the high desert into a platform: a place where large amounts of clean power can be generated, stored and exported.

California’s shifting role in the West

At the same time, California is rethinking how it fits into the broader Western grid.

Recent legislation opened the door for the state’s grid operator to participate in a more formal regional market, where utilities and system operators across multiple states can coordinate more closely. Instead of every state managing its own islanded system, the idea is to treat the West more like a single, interconnected machine.

Many of California’s neighbors face challenges that the state can help solve. Some lack strong year-round solar resources. Others struggle to build new transmission lines or to meet demand during extreme weather. California, for all of its own problems, combines robust renewable potential with an increasingly large fleet of battery storage.

Over the past few years, the state has gone from having almost no grid-scale batteries to having more than any other state in the country. Those batteries soak up excess solar during the day and release it in the evening and at night, when demand stays high.

If the build-out of solar and storage continues, California could become a net exporter of clean power to the rest of the West—especially during hours when its renewables are producing more than its own customers can use. The Antelope Valley, with its strong sun and access to transmission, is poised to be one of the regions that make that possible.

Power generated in the high desert is already flowing into Southern California. In a regional market, it could travel much farther.

The quiet importance of land

There is, however, a quieter part of this story: who controls the land where future infrastructure will go.

Before a single solar panel is installed or a substation is built, someone has to find the right parcel, clear legal and environmental issues, and hold that land through years of planning, permitting and grid studies. That work rarely makes headlines, but it determines which projects are even possible.

If California wants its high desert to help shoulder the burden of AI-driven demand, the unglamorous work of getting land ready has to happen years before anyone cuts a ribbon.

California, with its ambitious clean energy targets and growing portfolio of solar and storage, is better positioned than many states to pursue that path. Whether it succeeds will depend in part on what happens in places like the Antelope Valley.

Clean Energy Choices Ahead

Over the next decade, the West will decide what kind of system it wants. It can build a grid that treats AI and electrification as reasons to double down on fossil infrastructure, or one that uses this moment as the push needed to invest in transmission, storage and renewables at the necessary scale.

The high desert seems like the obvious place where that choice will be made. If the Antelope Valley can anchor new lines, host large volumes of solar and storage, and serve as clean-energy platforms for California and its neighbors, the state will be in a far stronger position to handle the AI surge.

AI may run on code, but its future will be decided by things that look far less futuristic: land parcels, steel towers and the political will to string new wires across the landscape. California still has a chance to show that a world with more computing power can also be a world with cleaner power. Whether it takes that chance will depend, in no small part, on what happens in the high desert most people only see through a car window on the way out of Los Angeles.

Originally published on https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-s-power-hunger-is-remaking-california-s-grid-the-high-desert-could-decide-who-wins/ar-AA1SCAzN?ocid=BingNewsSerp