OpenAI Paused Pro Signups as a 3GW Fault Hit Ashburn

OpenAI completed the rollout of GPT-6 Astra to every paid tier this week and then paused new Pro subscriptions, saying its highest-priced consumer customers strain its systems most. In the same window, Massachusetts became the third US state in three months to attach clean-power conditions to data center development, and MIT Technology Review documented a July 22 fault in Ashburn, Virginia that dropped more than three gigawatts of load in seconds. The constraint at the top of the market right now is serving capacity and electricity rather than model quality — and the buildout that would relieve it is meeting state-level friction. At the other end of the market, DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash undercut Astra dramatically on price the same week Anthropic accused Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepS ...