At the start of the gen AI boom, the scarcest asset seemed obvious: access to the frontier model. Companies rushed to license models such as GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini, hired prompt engineers, and built proprietary copilots. Then a different constraint emerged: access to GPUs, cloud capacity, and data-center space. Now, beneath all of that, a new constraint is emerging: electricity. The new scarcity is not intelligence but the energy-intensive infrastructure required to produce and deliver it.
