Ed Elson

And finally, the United Arab Emirates announced it is leaving OPEC, putting more pressure on the oil cartel's already strained supply.

Okay, what else is happening?

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to spend more than $650 billion this year on data centers.

And by 2030, data centers are expected to use twice as much electricity as they do today, enough to power France and Germany combined.

The problem, though, is that the grid might not be able to handle it.

Nearly 2,300 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity are currently stuck in the pipeline, more than the country's entire installed power capacity.

Meanwhile, Americans are already seeing their power bills climb.

In fact, residential prices could rise 15 to 40 percent over the next five years.

As a result,

14 states are considering moratoriums on data centers.

So this leaves us with a multi-trillion dollar question.

And that is, can the AI build-out actually happen the way Wall Street hoped that it would?

To discuss this, we're joined by a panel of experts, Jigar Shah, former director of the Loan Programs Office at the US Department of Energy, and also John Perrella, CEO at Terraflow Energy.

Jigar and John, thank you so much for joining me.

Jigar, I'll start with you.

When you look at the AI build-out right now and sort of the obstacles that are in its way between compute, between people's feelings and political sentiment towards the technology, and then also energy, what do you consider to be the most important obstacle, the thing that's most in its way?

Right.

Yeah, John, I mean, this is coinciding, this conversation, with some pretty significant news about OpenAI, which is that OpenAI missed its revenue targets last year, reportedly.

Same with its user targets.

And it reminds me of a lot of the promises that they have also been making.