Germán & Co, Karlstad, Sweden | August 6, 2025________________________________________
Why gigawatts — not gigaflops — will crown tomorrow’s AI super-powers
Once more, the visionary and wise CEO and President of AES Corporation warns:
“The smartest chips on Earth are useless in the dark.” — Andrés Gluski, Need for Speed: The Key to Winning the AI Race, 4 June 2025
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Prologue | Early signals, broader worries
Before kilowatts eclipsed algorithms in his speeches, Andrés Gluski was already arguing that natural gas would remain the critical “safety-valve” fuel while grids scaled renewables and storage.¹ His point was brutally pragmatic: windless nights and cloud-blanketed mornings do not wait for policy targets.
I remember one dawn in 2022 when an unexpected e-mail from Andrés landed in the senior staff inboxes. He urged “preventive measures against an incipient monkey-pox outbreak”, warning that supply-chain and construction crews could be sidelined just as the energy transition was accelerating. At the time, it felt alarmist. Yet, only months later, Wuhan-centred lockdowns and a second global health scare froze ports, delayed turbine gearboxes and reminded us that energy security is inseparable from public-health foresight. Gluski’s instinct for looming risk frames the question we face today: Will we build enough reliable power before the next disruption turns the lights off?
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1 │ From classroom recipes to terawatt appetites
A textbook algorithm is “a finite set of steps that yields a result.” Euclid’s divisor fits on a scrap of papyrus; a four-line Python sort runs on a phone. But today’s large-language models sprawl across trillions of parameters. One Nvidia GB200 “Blackwell” rack of 72 GPUs draws roughly 120 kW; a 30-rack pod crosses 3.5 MW, rivalling a utility-scale solar plant at noon. Code has become an industrial appetite measured in terawatt-hours.
Gluski’s June essay reduces the problem to three words: programming, computing, energy. On the first two fronts, parity or U.S. advantage may hold; on the third he fears a strategic shortfall if America cannot “build as much new power as is possible with the technologies we already have.”
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2 │ The shock ahead
The International Energy Agency projects that data-centre electricity use will more than double to ≈ 945 TWh by 2030 — about Japan’s entire demand today. Chip generations refresh every 18 months, yet turbines, transformers and 500-kV lines take close to a decade to materialise. The AI race is therefore an engineering marathon, not a coding sprint.
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3 │ America’s 2.6-terawatt traffic jam
By December 2024, projects totalling ≈ 2 600 GW — over 95 % solar, wind and storage — languished in U.S. grid-connection queues; the median wait is five years. Two new GPU generations will ship in that span while their promised electrons remain on paper.
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4 │ Beijing’s concrete advantage
China erected 268 GW of wind-and-solar capacity in the first half of 2025 — practically a whole U.S. renewables fleet in six months. Simultaneously it began 94.5 GW of new coal plants in 2024, the decade’s peak. The dual-track policy — clean narrative, fossil insurance — means AI campuses seldom wait for kilowatts. Speed beats purity.
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5 │ Washington’s nuclear moon-shot
On 31 July 2025, President Trump ordered the Department of Energy to bring three civilian small-modular reactors (SMRs) to “criticality” by 4 July 2026 — a timeline most engineers call “heroic.” If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can license at silicon speed, on-site nukes may yet anchor the hyperscale grid; if not, the decree risks becoming another paper reactor.
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6 │ The wire that wasn’t built
Generation is useless without wires. DOE’s latest Transmission Facilitation tranche backs only ≈ 1 000 mi of new high-voltage line — trivial beside China’s annual 13 000 km of UHV corridors. Meanwhile lead times for large power transformers have stretched to 2.3–4 years, double 2021 levels, with costs up more than 70 %.
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7 │ Global cross-winds: war, fuel and dependence
Three years into the Ukraine war, Russian pipeline flows are down but Russian LNG still slips into Europe: imports edged higher in 2024-25 even as U.S. cargoes fell. A leaked EEAS brief warns that continued reliance on Moscow’s molecules could “export the AI electricity dividend eastward.”
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8 │ Climate whiplash: heat versus cool chips
Record heat in 2025 forced grids on five continents to run flat-out while generation efficiency sagged. Cooling already accounts for over one-third of U.S. summer demand growth, tightening supply just as AI load accelerates.
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9 │ Industry’s mounting anxiety
In Uptime Institute’s 2025 survey 36 % of operators named power availability their top concern, triple the 2023 share. Amazon’s Andy Jassy calls electricity “the single biggest constraint” on AWS’s AI expansion as Big Tech earmarks $350 billion for new server halls this year.
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10 │ Ireland, the canary in the server hall
Data centres already consume 21 % of Ireland’s power and could near one-third within the decade, prompting regulators to require new campuses to provide on-site generation or storage. Other small grids are watching closely.
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11 │ When AES meets AI
AES pioneered the world’s first hour-by-hour 24/7 carbon-free contract for Google’s Virginia cluster in 2021. Now it pilots AI-driven demand-response tools to “manufacture megawatts” from flexibility. Gluski insists that prefab solar, construction robotics and grid-visualisation AI can “collapse the renewables-load mismatch” — but only if transmission steel wins funding parity with GPUs.
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12 │ Five levers before the lights dim
Leveraged required shift pay-off through first-ready, first-served interconnection queue triage by milestones rather than filing date. Removed speculative squatting off the grid. Managed shared cap-ex pools for upgrades. Spread network costs using wheeling fees. Eliminated billion-dollar shocks that can kill early-stage renewables. Established federal HVDC corridors and pre-approved rights-of-way, similar to Eisenhower’s highways. Halved litigation timelines across states. Implemented transparent SMR dashboards and monthly public scorecards. Exposed slippage before it metastasises. Utilised AI-optimised demand-response. Time-shifted non-critical compute, converting flexibility into virtual generation. First-served interconnection Queue triage by milestones, not filing date. Boots speculative squatting off the grid, shared cap-ex pools for upgrades, spreads network costs via wheeling fees, and removes billion-dollar shocks that kill early-stage renewables. Federal HVDC corridors Pre-approve rights-of-way like Eisenhower’s highways, halve litigation timelines across states. Transparent SMR dashboards, Monthly public score-cards, Exposes slippage before it metastasises, AI-optimised demand-response, Time-shift non-critical compute, Turns flexibility into virtual generation.
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Epilogue │ : The Flicker Test
Picture the decisive night — 2040, perhaps sooner — when a billion users summon answers and the server halls of Ashburn, Phoenix, Dublin and Shenzhen roar awake. The model forms its first syllable… and the lights dip. Drives gasp, cooling towers stall, and the “intelligence” of an entire civilisation is revealed as hostage to the hum of a turbine and the tensile strength of a transmission span.
That is the question history will grade: Did we build fast enough to keep the future switched on?
Pass, and machine reasoning might illuminate every classroom and clinic on Earth. Fail, and our most brilliant algorithms will join the Library of Alexandria — silicon ashes in the dark — while the nations that never hesitated to pour concrete write the next chapter in their own script.
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About the author
Germán Toro Ghio occupies a pivotal role at the intersection of energy transition and geopolitical strategy, bringing over thirty years of executive leadership and analytical expertise to some of the most intricate global challenges. As Chief Executive Officer of Germán & Co., he develops strategic narratives that influence policy discourse in governmental capitals and corporate boardrooms internationally.
His professional foundation is extensive, encompassing more than a decade with the United Nations Development Programme, followed by two critical years serving as Executive Secretary of the Forum of Culture Ministers for Latin America and the Caribbean. These experiences have cultivated his unique capacity to navigate cultural complexities within geopolitical contexts.
In the energy sector, Toro Ghio has employed communications as a strategic tool throughout two decades of leadership. His six-year tenure directing communications at Union Fenosa preceded a transformative fourteen-year period at AES Dominicana, where he advanced to the position of Vice President of Communications and contributed to establishing the company as a regional benchmark. His expertise regarding the nexus of energy and geopolitics has been recognised by EnergyCentral.com, which featured him in its esteemed Power Perspectives™ Interview Series.
Beyond his corporate roles, Toro Ghio has acted as a trusted advisor to the U.S. Department of State and the Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos, while also providing strategic guidance to several Latin American presidents on matters of energy policy and cultural diplomacy. His analytical acumen has proven consistently accurate, with his forecasts concerning energy market dynamics and geopolitical shifts demonstrating the strategic foresight that renders him a highly regarded authority within global energy forums.
Whether engaging with energy ministers or corporate leaders, Toro Ghio excels in distilling complexity into clarity, offering insights that not only inform but also shape the decisions influencing the future of energy.
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