Federal regulators handed utilities a deadline this summer that has nothing to do with a storm or a heat wave. On July 16, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to write mandatory reliability standards for a new class of grid customer: the AI data center. NERC has until Dec. 31 to figure out how to fold gigawatt-scale computing campuses into a system built to move electricity, not babysit it. Gartner expects power shortages to operationally constrain 40 percent of existing AI…