Northern Virginia has become one of the clearest illustrations of America's emerging power dilemma.

An NBC4 Washington report this week highlighted concerns that the extraordinary concentration of data centers across Northern Virginia is placing increasing strain on the region's electrical infrastructure, raising questions that now extend beyond electricity prices and economic development into grid resilience and national security.

The concern deserves attention. But the more consequential question is what we do about it.

There is an uncomfortable feature of the quantum computing revolution that gets lost amid the extraordinary promises of new drugs, advanced materials, better artificial intelligence and computational breakthroughs that would be impossible with today's machines.

Quantum computing doesn't have to arrive tomorrow to create a cybersecurity problem today.

The next great infrastructure opportunity may not be building more. It may be getting more from what we already have.

America is entering a new era of electricity demand.

AI. Data centers. Advanced manufacturing. Electrification. Economic development.

Each is creating enormous new requirements for power—often much faster than the infrastructure required to serve it can be planned, permitted and constructed.

Google is targeting 2029. The federal government has established a 2030 objective for critical systems. Post-quantum cryptography is no longer a future cybersecurity problem.

For years, quantum computing occupied a comfortable category:

Important. Transformational. But distant.

That assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

For years, cybersecurity experts have warned that America's water and wastewater infrastructure represents one of the nation's most attractive targets for cyber adversaries. Last week's coordinated attacks against multiple water systems in Minnesota—and the subsequent reports of similar activity expanding to additional states—demonstrate that this threat is no longer theoretical. It has arrived.

Most discussions about quantum computing begin with a question:

"When will quantum computers become powerful enough to break today's encryption?"

It is the wrong question. The more important question is:

"How long will it take to protect the world's critical infrastructure before that day arrives?"

The answer is measured not in months—but in years.

That is why governments around the world have already begun one of the largest cybersecurity transitions in history: migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

For years, the conversation around America's electrical grid has revolved around one question:

How do we build more power?

The Wall Street Journal recently framed the challenge in stark terms. Utilities across the United States are preparing to invest roughly $1.4 trillion over the next five years as electricity demand accelerates, driven by artificial intelligence, hyperscale data centers, manufacturing, and electrification.