The AI Power Trade: Why Boring Utilities Became the Hottest Stocks of the Cycle

The single most underestimated constraint in the AI build-out is not chips. It is not capital. It is not even talent. It is electricity. A gigawatt of new AI data center capacity used to be a once-a-decade event. There are now more than a hundred gigawatts of announced AI capacity in the US alone, against a grid that has grown peak demand by less than half a percent per year for two decades.