Alberta put the compute at the wellhead. California put it in the house.

Every forecast for the next five years says the same thing, and the number is not in dispute. McKinsey puts global data center demand at 82.3 gigawatts in 2025 and 219.0 by 2030. That is not a rounding error or a scenario. It is the load roughly tripling inside five years, and there is no version of this where the answer is that we need less generation. We need vastly more, we need it built, and an operator who accepts a curtailment clause in exchange for a faster hookup will be beaten by whoever found firm power and never had to. (Oh, and SpaceX will monopolize the orbit for some use cases as well.)

So the interesting question is not whether to build. It is where the next increment physically goes, and there the arithmetic gets strange.

Inside that 219 gigawatts, the two halves of AI move at different speeds. Training grows from 23.1 gigawatts to 62.2, a 22 percent compound rate. Inference grows from 20.9 to 93.3, a 35 percent rate, and McKinsey has it passing training as the dominant workload around 2027. By 2030 inference is more than half of all AI compute and somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of total data center demand.

Those two halves do not want the same building. Training wants one coherent fabric, physical adjacency, thousands of chips that fail as a unit if a node drops, which is why labs ended up renting megawatts from each other rather than waiting to build. Inference wants to be near the person waiting for the answer. McKinsey says this part out loud: inference drives metro and near-metro siting optimised for latency, against training's large high-density campuses.

The workload is splitting, but the non-obvious part is not that it split. It is where the second half lands.

Two pilots that look nothing alike

On 8 July, Sunrun announced it was putting AI inference nodes inside houses. The company has more than 1.1 million customers with solar and battery systems, and the nodes are paired to the battery already bolted to the wall, which means the compute keeps running through certain grid outages. Homeowners are paid to host. Span, which makes smart electrical panels, is going further: roughly 1,600 liquid-cooled inference GPUs, about 1.25 megawatts, distributed across 100 newly built homes in a 2026 pilot, shipped through Pulte, the third-largest homebuilder in the United States. Span owns the hardware and sells the compute to whoever wants it. The homeowner gets a discount.

Three weeks earlier and two thousand miles north, a different kind of announcement. FingerMotion filed a memorandum of understanding with BlueFlare Energy Solutions to build edge inference sites across Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The sites are small, half a megawatt to two megawatts, and they sit behind the meter at natural-gas production facilities. BlueFlare owns the generators. The electricity reaches the chips without ever touching the transmission grid. The first project in Alberta pairs a megawatt of bitcoin mining with a planned 500 kilowatts of inference at three cents a kilowatt-hour, held for three years, and the load-balancing software swings between the two in real time depending on which is worth more that hour.

A rooftop in a Pulte subdivision and a gas well in Alberta have approximately nothing in common. The fuel is opposite. The politics are opposite. One of them is running bitcoin miners.

But they are the same instrument.

Both put compute behind a meter, next to generation that already exists, and neither one joins the interconnection queue. That is the whole move. The queue is what makes a hundred-megawatt campus a multi-year project, and the queue is a property of the transmission system, not of the wires running to the building. Step behind the meter and the calendar changes completely.

The grid has a second floor

The distribution network is the part nobody argues about. It is sized for the worst hour of the worst day, which means that for most hours of most days it is carrying a fraction of what it could. Span's chief executive puts the figure at 40 to 45 percent utilisation, though that is his number and he is selling something.

What is better established is what happens when you organise the things already sitting on that network. On 29 July last year more than 100,000 residential batteries across California discharged together for two hours in the evening, and Brattle measured the result at an average of 535 megawatts. Tesla and Sunrun have each since claimed most of that figure, which works only because Sunrun installs Tesla batteries and both press offices are counting the same electrons.

Ontario did the volume version rather than the power version: the province's Peak Perks programme signed up 100,000 households in about six months and can now shed more than 150 megawatts at peak, which started as 90, roughly a city the size of Kingston stepping off the grid on request. Granted, they're different. Ontario's is a hundred thousand thermostats nudging themselves a degree. California's is batteries pushing electrons back the other way.

Nobody permitted a power plant for either. Nobody dug anything.

Duke's Nicholas Institute ran the general version of this in early 2025, across the 22 largest American balancing authorities, which together carry 95 percent of national demand. If a new large load will accept curtailment for a quarter of one percent of its maximum uptime, the existing system absorbs 76 gigawatts of it. At one percent, 126. The authors are careful, and note a caveat: they did not model transmission constraints, which could cut the headroom substantially. The number is contested and should be. But the direction survives the argument.

What the roof is actually worth

Here is the part that reorganised my thinking, and it is a comparison nobody seems to be making.

At Blatchford in Edmonton, EPCOR and sonnen and four other partners are running what they call Canada's first battery-based virtual power plant. Each house gets solar and a five-kilowatt battery with twenty kilowatt-hours of storage, and the hardware cost is folded into the purchase price of the home. Eight houses are occupied so far, incidentally, not the hundred most of the coverage reports; the hundred is a 2027 target.

A participating household earns about $300 a year selling energy back.

A household hosting compute is offered $1,800 a year off its power and internet.

That is six times more, and it is theconservative reading. It uses Span's number, which is a discount rather than a payment. Another entrant, Nanocenter, claims homeowners could clear as much as two thousand a month.

Six times is enough. The roof earns more renting compute than renting electrons, and once that is true the economics of distributed energy stop depending on electricity markets at all. They start depending on inference demand, which is growing at 35 percent a year.

The same asymmetry shows up on the industrial side, in the other direction. Hydro-Québec has proposed a rate for large data centers averaging around thirteen cents a kilowatt-hour, roughly double what its big industrial customers pay now. An Alberta wellhead is offering three. The grid is pricing scarcity, correctly, because grid power is scarce. Behind the meter is pricing something else entirely: gas that has nowhere better to go.

Why this is good news for the campuses

None of this competes with hyperscale. It unbundles it.

The frontier training runs are going to happen in enormous buildings with enormous substations, and they should. Nobody is running a frontier pre-training job across eight thousand houses. But the marginal, latency-tolerant, politically expensive slice of the buildout does not need that building, and the marginal slice is precisely the one generating the backlash. Eight states rolled back data center tax subsidies this year. Seventeen more considered it. The moratorium argument has stopped being a fringe position.

A campus needs a community to say yes. A behind-the-meter node needs a landowner to say yes, and pays them. Those are very different sales, and only one of them ends up at a county commission meeting.

The Canadian version is not the one I expected

I went looking for the Canadian rooftop story, because that is the tidy version and because this country has the substrate for it. What I found instead was a gas well.

Canada has the residential base. Ontario has the largest residential virtual power plant on the continent by household count. Edmonton has the first battery one. But the Canadian edge-compute money is going behind the meter at natural-gas sites in the west, balancing inference against bitcoin, because that is where power is stranded and cheap right now.

Which is, if you squint, exactly the argument about energy sovereignty arriving one floor lower than expected. The claim was that a country cannot own its AI without owning its power. The refinement is that owning the power is not enough on its own, because power that cannot reach a load is not an asset. What matters is owning power that has a load standing next to it. Alberta figured that out with gas. The rooftop version is the same trade with a different fuel and a much larger number of participants.

None of it is at scale yet. Sunrun has a proof of concept, Span ships commercially in 2027, the Alberta sites are a memorandum. This is the shape of the next increment, not the current one.

The grid needs more power than we are building. That stays true. But somewhere between the transmission planners arguing about interconnection and the county boards arguing about moratoriums, a hundred thousand batteries in California quietly did two hours of work one evening in July, and nobody had to approve it.

—TJ