AI is ravenous. Some people ask it for the perfect blanched peas recipe, others push it into the red asking how to tune a Skoda to 700 horsepower. The meter spins like crazy.
Business, meanwhile, has left the experimentation phase and moved into solutions that often consume more than they return. The sector pours far more into hardware and electricity than it bills back and calls it an investment in the future.
And it's not only AI. In fact, every technology growing fastest right now — electric vehicles, battery energy storage systems, data centers is just as hungry. They're scaling exponentially and putting pressure on the grid that the world has never faced before. While some see grid stability issues and lurking collapse, others keep selling the paradigm of unlimited scaling. As if electricity were software.
This panel opens the question nobody likes to ask out loud: what if the real constraint on the future isn't a shortage of innovation or algorithms, but the physical inability to power our own ambitions?
The answer won't come from a slide deck. In the panel, people running the industry will speak out loud what they usually question behind closed doors.