Roundtable
Capacity, Interconnection and Resilience
Time to power is the near-term gating factor for edge deployment. Existing communications sites have real but limited headroom, new utility interconnection can take years, and backup, conversion and cooling requirements for AI compute differ from long-standing telecom practice. This roundtable brings together site owners, utilities, power developers and operators to map what is actually available, where the bottlenecks are, and what the industry should ask for together.
Key questions
- How much usable electrical headroom do existing communications sites really have, and how does it vary by site type and location?
- What does it take to secure a new utility connection today, and what would shorten the queue?
- How should backup power, batteries and generators be sized for AI workloads compared with traditional telecom equipment?
- How do DC power at radio sites, AC compute equipment and rack-density cooling choices change the design of a site?
- Where do on-site generation, storage and microgrids make deployments faster or more resilient, and where do they add cost or complexity?
- What shared data on site-level power demand would help utilities and the industry plan capacity ahead of demand?
The moderator brings back
A ranked list of power barriers, and two or three specific asks of utilities and power providers.