Behind-the-Fence Power

The constraint on AI capacity is shifting from chips to siting and power — and the binding limit is now political, not technical. Two things happened in this window: local opposition to data centers converted into electoral consequences, and grid operators began openly discussing curtailing data-center load to protect residential supply. The forward proposition: within a year, the scarce input for frontier compute is an approved interconnect and a community that will tolerate you, not GPUs.

What makes this unusually potent is that the backlash is bipartisan — one of the very few tech-policy positions where it is.

I'm long the behind-the-fence power theme — the build-out doesn't stop, it retreats onto ground where the neighbors can't vote it down. And I'd short the idea that you can still pour concrete in someone's backyard.

The AI build-out was always going to hit something. Turns out it wasn't silicon.