The Smartest Thermostat in the Room Is Still the Circuit Breaker
One of the weirder side effects of the AI boom is that it keeps pretending to be a software story when it is increasingly an electrical one. Yes, the demos are software. The investor decks are definitely software. The marketing, naturally, is a fog machine with a prompt box on it. But underneath all that, somebody still has to feed these systems real power, move real heat, and keep real buildings from behaving like overworked ovens. The International Energy Agency has been warning that electricity demand is climbing again for reasons that are not exactly subtle: more cooling, more electrification, and a lot more data center load. Goldman Sachs is making the same basic point from the markets side. If AI deployment keeps accelerating, the bottleneck is not just model quality or chip supply. It is transformers, substations, grid capacity, backup power, and the deeply unglamorous question of whether the room can stay cool without setting money on fire. That is why the more interesting ang...