Belden Brick has been making bricks in Sugarcreek, Ohio for 141 years. Their products are in the Texas Alamo. Notre Dame University. Last year, their monthly electricity capacity charge jumped from $1,600 to $12,000 — a 650% increase — driven largely by data center demand in the region. PJM capacity prices have risen more than 1,000% over the last two years, and the brick company is absorbing the blast radius.
This is the collision nobody planned for. The AI buildout is real, the demand is real, and the data center power market is on track to exceed $200 billion annually. But the cost isn't landing evenly. Industrial electricity prices are growing faster than residential rates, and some of the regulatory proposals designed to make Big Tech pay more are written broadly enough to sweep in manufacturers whose power needs can be 50 times smaller than a single hyperscaler campus.
The electricity maximalist position here isn't to shrug. It's to build faster and smarter. The answer to scarcity-driven price spikes is abundance — more generation, more grid capacity, more behind-the-meter supply. Which is exactly what Valar Atomics demonstrated last week in Utah: a microreactor powering an Nvidia Blackwell chip, the first time a next-generation reactor has done so in the US. Bloomberg confirmed the demonstration — Valar's Ward 250 reactor, connected directly to AI compute, bypassing the grid entirely.
That's the model. Not "make AI pay more" — though accountability matters — but "stop fighting over a constrained grid and build new supply." The brick company's problem isn't that data