The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the official grid watchdog, has warned that AI data centers are creating instability in North America's power grid through unpredictable power demand spikes. This matters because data centers are now straining the grid in densely developed areas like the eastern US, forcing utilities to overhaul their infrastructure — and in Oregon, new rules require data centers to pay for the grid upgrades they trigger rather than passing costs to regular ratepayers. NERC is developing new reliability standards specifically for large data centers, marking a shift from treating them as standard power users to managing them as a systemic grid risk.