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Quiz of the week, 2026-09-20

The week the AI boom ran out of power

Ten questions from this week in AI and the factory floor. Two are match-ups. Every answer is a fact from a piece on this site or a public source, and every explanation says where it came from.

10 questions1 match-upsAbout 4 minutesEvery answer sourced

0 of 10 answered

Question 1 AI this weekOn 16 September 2026 the US House of Representatives voted on the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill about who pays for the power lines new AI data centres need. What was the vote? It failed 417 to 3 218 to 214 300 to 120

Four hundred and seventeen to three. The bill asks states to make loads over 100 megawatts pay the full cost of their own grid upgrades, so households do not carry it. It still needs the Senate. Read the piece

Question 2 AI this weekAmazon signed a long-term deal this week for backup generators at its data centres. With whom, and for up to how much? Siemens Energy, up to $20 billion Tesla, up to $5 billion Generac, up to $8 billion Caterpillar, up to $2 billion

Generac, the backup-generator maker, filed the agreement with the SEC on 15 September: up to $8 billion of purchases, with the first $2.4 billion delivered in 2027 and 2028, plus warrants for Amazon to buy Generac shares. Read the piece

Question 3 AI this weekEmerald AI, Google and NVIDIA launched the AI Energy Management Alliance on 16 September. What does a flexible data centre in that alliance do when the grid is strained? Buys electricity from households Pauses or shifts non-critical work, or runs on stored or on-site power Switches its servers off for the day Nothing; it draws full power regardless

It pauses or moves non-critical jobs and can draw on batteries or paired generation for a few hours, so the grid can serve everyone else. A 2025 Goldman Sachs study says that flexibility could let another 100 gigawatts of data centres connect. Read the piece

Question 4 AI this weekTrue or false: the Ratepayer Protection Act orders every state to adopt the new data-centre rules within one year. True False

False. The bill requires states to consider the standards, with one year to begin and two years to decide. Only 13 states had no large-load tariff at all as of July 2026, according to Utility Dive. Read the piece

Question 5 AI this weekAnthropic reported this week how much of the work that builds the next Claude is now led by Claude itself. What was the figure for August 2026? About 26 percent, up from under 1 percent in February About 60 percent About 5 percent About 90 percent

Twenty-six percent, up from under one percent in February, according to Anthropic's own account published on 17 September. More than ninety percent of that work had the model as a collaborator or better. Source

Question 6 The numberIn March 2018 a power outage at Samsung's Pyeongtaek chip plant lasted about 30 minutes. Roughly how many wafers were lost? About 600 About 6,000 None; the machines rode through it About 60,000

About sixty thousand wafers, the thin discs chips are made on, roughly 3.5 percent of the world's flash memory output for that month, according to TrendForce figures reported at the time. Read the piece

Question 7 MES and the floorSEMI F47 is the chip industry's rule for how a factory machine must behave when the grid dips. Since 2000, how deep a dip must every machine ride through without stopping? Zero power for five seconds Full power only; any dip may stop it Half power for a fifth of a second Ten percent power for one minute

Fifty percent voltage for 0.2 seconds, seventy percent for half a second and eighty percent for one second, all without interrupting the process. First published in 2000 and updated in 2006, it is required by most fabs worldwide. Read the piece

Question 8 MES and the floorWhen a power dip is longer than the rule allows, what does a chip factory's floor software do with the batches inside the machines? Holds them where they are and raises an alarm for people Scraps every batch automatically Guesses which step was reached and moves on Restarts every machine at once

It holds each batch at its last known step and raises an alarm. Nobody guesses. A stop of under one minute at Samsung's Hwaseong plant in December 2019 still took two to three days to restart because every machine had to be cleaned, restarted and checked. Read the piece

Question 9 MES and the floorTrue or false: a single advanced chip factory draws roughly as much electricity as a mid-sized European city, around 200 megawatts. True False

True. One advanced fab draws roughly 200 megawatts, and TSMC alone uses about eight percent of Taiwan's electricity, a share S&P expects to grow toward a quarter by 2030. Read the piece

Question 10 AI this weekMatch each power move to the world it belongs to.

Pay for your own power lines

Pause the job when the grid is tight

Ride through half power for a fifth of a second

Hold the batch and raise an alarm

The data centre world chose to pay and to pause; the factory cannot pause, so it rides through the blink and, when it cannot, holds and calls for help. Read the piece

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Earlier weeks

2026-09-15The week the AI companies asked to slow down 2026-09-12The week the dashboard turned out to be a copy

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