AI Is Pushing the Grid to the Edge

Just like that… the Stone Age.

Almost exactly a year ago, April 28, 2025, I was sitting in my little rat-hole of an office in my Lisbon apartment, writing a Field Notes dispatch, just as I am right now, and darkness fell upon me.

All the power was off in the apartment.

And in the building.

And on my street.

And across all of Lisbon.

And throughout the entirety of Portugal and Spain.

In that moment, I didn’t know I was about to experience a 12-hour preview of what America is about to do to itself on purpose.

Here’s what I remember most.

The silence.

And I mean a silence like the movie A Quiet Place. A post-apocalyptic silence that, honestly, was kinda creepy.

Modern life has a hum to it—refrigerators, air conditioners, the buzz of streetlights, the low drone of traffic in the distance. You don’t notice it until its absence is so obvious. Unsettling is the best word.

Then the small failures started cascading.

Card readers went dark. ATMs, dead. Gas pumps, useless. The metro stopped. Traffic signals turned into suggestion boxes. Elevators froze—thankfully I wasn’t in one at the time, but a woman was stuck in one at my gym for several hours. Airports shut down. Train stations emptied. Hospitals scrambled onto backup generators while surgeons finished operations by flashlight.

And the weirdest part? Cash suddenly became the only currency that worked.

Bodegas in my ‘hood had no way to process debit card payments. No cash… no grub.

In an age where I can (and regularly do) go months without touching a physical euro, the digital economy I’d built my life around evaporated in a blink.

As I said—Stone Age.

The whole thing lasted about 12 hours.

And the entire time, I kept thinking one thing: Imagine if this is where we end up as a society…

Truthfully, frighteningly, that possibility isn’t as remote as we might hope.

I mean, the American electricity grid is about three-hamsters-on-a-treadmill away from disaster.

Here are the numbers that should be keeping policymakers awake at night—and that almost none of them are paying attention to.

The American Society of Civil Engineers recently released its 2025 Infrastructure Report Card.

The US electricity grid earned a D+.

And the US Department of Energy is now warning that blackouts could increase 100-fold by 2030.

To be clear, that’s not 100%.

It’s 100 times!

Northern Virginia is home to the densest concentration of data centers on the planet, those big warehouse-sized buildings housing oodles and oodles of computer tech that runs AI and other data-intensive services.

In the summer of 2024, the entire region narrowly avoided a blackout when 60 data centers simultaneously switched to backup power after a single equipment fault.

The knock-on effects would have been enormous.

But that just highlights a bigger problem: By 2030, US data centers will need up to 606 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. That’s more than triple today’s total data center demand.

And the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, recently testified to Congress that AI’s energy demand could consume up to 99% of America’s total current power generation.

Ninety-nine percent. Pretty much every watt of power America generates… just for AI.

Tell me how that works out.

Meanwhile, we spent the last 30 years shutting down baseload power plants because they weren’t green enough, delaying or cancelling nuclear projects because they weren’t popular enough, and underinvesting in grid infrastructure because it wasn’t sexy enough.

What could possibly go wrong when a D+ infrastructure from 40-50 years ago runs headfirst into explosive, 21st century demand?

Here’s what I’ve learned from three decades of writing about financial markets: Every energy crisis in modern history has been solved by massive capital deployment into the specific item of scarcity.

The 1970s oil crisis built the North Sea fields, unlocked Prudhoe Bay, and eventually seeded the shale revolution that made America energy independent.

The early-2000s bandwidth crunch built the modern data center industry — the same industry that’s now causing this crisis.

The 2008 financial crisis rebuilt the global banking system into something more resilient than what came before it.

This power-consumption crisis is going to build something too, and the companies that solve this crisis are going to mint fortunes.

The question isn’t whether the world builds its way out of this. It will, of course. Humans are ingenious at solving problems like this.

The questions are what we build and who profits from that.

All of this is what I call the Final Wealth Transfer that AI is ushering in.

The early, easy wealth in companies like Nvidia, Google, Meta, and others has already been made. Heck, I bought into all three of those more than a dozen years ago, and I was selling out of them with 500% gains by 2020.

While those stocks might still push higher simply because of momentum, the folks running those companies are actually putting their wealth to work elsewhere these days.

And that’s where I want to be.

When the lights came back on in Lisbon that evening, I watched my neighbors cheer in the street. It felt like a holiday.

It also felt like a warning… not about what happens when infrastructure fails, but about what happens when we’ve forgotten how much we depend on it.

In a control room somewhere in America, a warning light is already blinking.

Nobody who matters is watching.

But I’m watching. And I am telling you now that AI is going to create a boatload of wealth where very few except those in the know are looking.

More to come…