You can pour a data center's concrete in a year. Getting it connected to the grid can take several, and that gap has quietly become the binding constraint on the entire AI buildout. The map of where compute gets built is usually explained by cheap land, cool climates or tax incentives, and those still matter at the margin. But the real gatekeeper is the interconnection queue: the long, congested line of projects waiting for permission and physical capacity to draw power from the transmission network. In many regions that queue now stretches out for years, and studies must confirm the wires can even carry the load before a single server switches on. So the industry has started hunting backwards, chasing existing high-voltage corridors and available substations, and siting billion-dollar campuses wherever a connection can actually be had. The scarce resource was never the building. It was the permission to plug it in.