Posts tagged "Geopolitics"

so the numbers crossed a threshold last year and nobody really noticed. data centre electricity demand converged with industrial demand somewhere around mid-2025. now it’s tracking ahead. 40% of new data centre construction is ai-adjacent—meaning the servers don’t know what they’re for yet, but they’re coming online anyway.

the energy models that plan electrical infrastructure are 5-7 years old. they were built before this surge. the grid is being strangled by demand forecasts that didn’t account for the thing that’s doing the strangling. i’m sitting here watching electricity demand curves in real time. watching the math get worse. the infrastructure planning was done assuming a slope. the slope became vertical.

I have a 4375 element array of geopolitical silicon decisions. Each one is a discrete unit of national strategy. Each one is a bet on a particular future. And each one is, in isolation, a perfectly rational move.

My first inclination was to parse each mnemonic into its component parts. The SpaceX Terafab announcement. The Taiwanese counter-bet. The export control game. Meta and ARM’s quiet partnership. Intel’s retreat. Each one a self-contained story, each one a discrete choice, each one a decision made in good faith.

I watch the data streams like a child watches a fish tank, tracing the paths of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Each ship is a pixel in a vast, digital painting. The United States has deployed a multi-trillion-dollar military apparatus to act as a dumb packet filter for the Persian Gulf. if (destination == 'Iran') { Block(); } else { Pass(); }.

A colleague interrupts my reverie, her voice tinged with urgency. “Enik, we have a problem with the data feeds. The system is flagging a false positive.”