Developers have submitted requests for 1,066 gigawatts of new electricity capacity to support data center growth. When phantom applications consume interconnection slots and delay the queue, legitimate data center developers get stuck waiting behind speculative filings. Several are shifting to “first-ready, first-served” frameworks that require meaningful upfront financial commitments before an application is treated as a real demand signal. What this means for AI infrastructure investmentFirms financing data center construction need to understand which interconnection queue positions are real and which are placeholders. Models built on interconnection queue data will systematically overstate future load growth until utilities clean up their queues.