AI is rewriting the economy, but the real story is unfolding offstage: the world is running out of power.
For two years the conversation was about chips. Then it was about models. Both still matter. But ask anyone building a large data center what slows them down, and the answer is now the same. It is getting enough electricity, soon enough. The limit has moved from silicon to megawatts.
What we did about it
We spent eighteen months looking at power companies and two years on advanced nuclear. Most of what we saw was theory. Impressive science, credible people, and a first commercial unit ten years away. We passed on nearly all of it.
Our test was simple. Is it real and operating today? Can it be deployed in months, not decades? In a land grab, time to power is king.
What passed
Exowatt stores the sun's heat and releases it as electricity on demand, in modular units. Radiant builds a one-megawatt reactor that travels on a truck. Redwood Materials builds grid-scale storage, including from batteries that have already lived one life in a car.
None of them needs a new physics result to work. Each is being built now.
The same constraint, one layer up
Power is the first bottleneck. Compute is the second. Training a model gets the attention, but running it, which the industry calls inference, is where a growing share of the work is done. That is why we back clouds and chips designed for AI from the ground up, not adapted to it afterwards.
Where it meets defense
A military base and a data center want the same things from a power source. It should be reliable, it should not depend on a fragile grid, and it should arrive quickly. One product can serve both. That overlap, between the infrastructure of AI and the security of the country, is where we spend most of our time.
Simply put, intelligence is now an industrial product. It needs land, power, cooling and steel before it needs anything else. We invest accordingly.
This note reflects the views of Inflection Ventures as of the date written. It is not investment advice or an offer to sell securities.