Aparna Ramani

The most recent Queued Up report from Berkeley Lab is out. Steven Zhang and I are proud to be listed as coauthors on this edition. The Interconnection.fyi team worked closely with Joseph Rand and the rest of the LBNL team to provide the data that powers this year's analysis. Supporting this level of research is core to our mission of bringing transparency to the wholesale energy markets. The 2025 edition (covering data through the end of 2024) highlights some significant shifts in the landscape: Active Capacity: 2024 closed with nearly 2,300 GW of generation and storage seeking interconnection. Changing Mix: Active natural gas capacity increased by 72% year over year, while solar and storage saw slight decreases in total queue volume. The Backlog: 408 GW of capacity already has an executed or draft interconnection agreement but has not yet reached commercial operations. Timelines: For projects built between 2018 and 2024, the median duration from request to operation has doubled compared to the early 2000s. This report is the definitive annual benchmark for the industry and provides a vital baseline as we begin to see the implementation of FERC Order 2023. The analysis in this report is based on our EOY 2024 data snapshot. Since then, we have continued to track and update these queues every single day. If you want a live view of how these numbers have shifted in the months since this snapshot was taken, follow Interconnection.fyi and subscribe to our Substack. You can find the full slide deck, interactive maps, and raw data files at the link in the comments.

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I love my woodworking hobby (my workshop might take exception to the "hobby" label). The use of genAI and agentic AI among top software and ML engineers reminds me of the use of powered machines among fine woodworkers. A recent newsletter from the renowned woodworker Christopher Schwarz is a good illustration: "People react with shock and horror when they learn I have electric machinery in my Kentucky workshop. [...]" "I get asked a lot about CNC and other digital woodworking tools. Aren’t they the devil? I mean, they can do all the cutting while you’re at lunch. You’re not even touching the wood. That’s not woodworking. Of course using digital tools is woodworking. Yes, real woodworking. The tools can be used really well. A one-person shop can put out work that rivals a four-person shop. They can make short production runs affordable. They can do some cuts with little effort that a shop full of jigs would struggle with. Oh, and they can also be used to produce a piece of shit." It's craftsmen, not tools, that determine the quality of the product. AI is still just a tool, and that's how the best engineers will treat it.

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NVIDIA's DGX Spark started shipping this week. $3,999 for a petaflop on your desk. Research labs currently skip experiments because justifying cloud spend takes three approvals. Startups burn runway on compute before knowing if ideas work. Teams prototype in the cloud, then find their models behave differently in production. Run 200B parameter models locally. Fine-tune 70B models without cloud dependency. Link two units for 405B parameters. The development cycle tightens considerably. The GB10 Grace Blackwell chip is purpose-built for this—MediaTek collaborated on the CPU side, 128GB of memory sits between the CPU and GPU without the usual bottleneck. Different from retrofitting gaming hardware for AI workloads. Training frontier models still requires massive infrastructure. Production inference at scale needs proper compute. But prototyping, testing, fine-tuning—that friction just dropped significantly. Useful ideas die when the barrier to experiment is too high. The path from concept to test matters. $4,000 isn't nothing, but it's orders of magnitude less than building a cluster. NVIDIA's framing this as "democratizing AI"—partially marketing, partially true. The number of teams who can now iterate at this level just expanded considerably.

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Columbus, Ohio has 13 percent growth in company formation YoY. We also just passed Chicago as the 5th largest concentration of data centers worldwide. Construction is accelerating. #ohiotech -

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