Most of the capital in artificial intelligence flows toward chipmakers. Meanwhile, the hardest constraint, the one nobody can step around, sits a layer below: it is electricity, and more precisely immediate access to very firm power. A modern data center can draw as much power as a small town. These sites need uninterrupted supply located close to the load and switched on within a short window of two to four years. That is a physical limit on growth that no amount of source code will overcome. And that is exactly where the real supply problem in the market sits today.
Why gas turbines specifically, rather than green energy or grid expansion? Interconnection queues in the US and Europe run for years. Transmission system operators cannot build high-voltage lines at the pace the tech giants demand. Renewables, for their part, get bogged down in permitting and are intermittent by nature. Batteries can only shift energy in time, they do not create it out of nothing. Next-generation nuclear (SMRs included) is still a decade away from commercial scale. Heavy gas turbines remain the only technology that lets operators build large, fully dispatchable capacity right next to the server halls inside the timeframe they are working with. The leading cloud providers and the utilities tied to them understand this perfectly well, and are ordering gas units in bulk.