Power, Not Chips, Now Decides Who Wins the AI Race

The AI race has stopped being a story about chips. In this issue of Digital Power Digest, Keel Infrastructure SVP Chris Ruppel breaks down eight forces reshaping how AI infrastructure actually gets built, starting with power, the hardest constraint of all. Pennsylvania's resource-adequacy analysis shows the grid failing PJM's reliability criterion from 2027 through 2030, driven largely by data-center load growth, and that shortfall is pushing developers to act like power companies themselves. "Bring your own power" started as a workaround, but with Vertiv moving into microgrid controls and xAI building a battery-backed campus in Memphis, self-generation is becoming the standard.