Who Gets the Electrons?

Big Tech’s Secret Scramble for Power in the Age of AI

At the Pennsylvania Energy & Innovation Summit, held July 15, 2025, at Carnegie Mellon University, every major CEO, from Microsoft to Oracle to Amazon, quietly dropped the same bombshell: the real challenge to artificial intelligence isn’t chips, code, or talent. It’s electricity.

The headlines spun the event as “Historic pledges for AI innovation.” The photo-ops showed promises of trillion-parameter models. But the subtext was clear: the grid cannot power everyone, not governments, not homes, not factories, and not the hyperscale data centers that are now multiplying.