AI Is Reshaping National Power, but America's Real Bottleneck Is Not Chips -- It Is Electricity

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GFM's AI & Energy Research Brings "The Power Grid as National Power" into U.S. Technology, Energy, and National Security Discourse

IRVINE, Calif., Jan. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly incorporated into national strategic frameworks, U.S. technological competitiveness is expanding at an unprecedented pace. Yet beneath public narratives dominated by semiconductors, algorithms, and capital allocation, a more fundamental—and far less easily accelerated—structural constraint is emerging: electricity and power grid infrastructure.

Global Finance Media Group (GFM) has recently released a series of research papers under its AI & Energy research initiative (https://www.gfm.news/en/ai-energy), presenting a core finding that can be directly evaluated by policymakers and industry decision-makers:
In the AI era, energy is no longer merely an industrial input or cost factor. It is becoming a decisive variable shaping national security, industrial resilience, and institutional efficiency.
As computing capacity scales at an exponential rate, the responsiveness of power systems—across engineering timelines, permitting and approval processes, and cross-regional coordination—is increasingly unable to keep pace with AI deployment. As a result, the upper boundary of national power competition is shifting from chips and algorithms to a far more difficult reality to accelerate: the power grid.

In the race to position AI as a national strategic asset, electricity and power grids are no longer solely energy-sector concerns. They are emerging as institutional constraints that are reshaping technology deployment pathways, military capability boundaries, and the structural foundations of national security.

GFM's research series opens with AI & Energy: The Underestimated Boundary of National Power, which frames the issue, and continues with Why the World Is Stalled on Energy, identifying a growing misalignment between the pace of global energy transition and power system construction and the rapid deployment of AI infrastructure. This divergence is creating pronounced institutional time lags and engineering bottlenecks.

The issue is elevated to the national security level in the third study, Power Shortages Are Becoming a Hidden Constraint on U.S. National Security, authored by U.S.-based electricity and energy systems expert Cheng Maiyue. The analysis systematically examines how electricity shortages propagate from data centers and computing supply chains into AI-enabled military and intelligence applications, critical infrastructure operations, and the energy transition itself—evolving into a long-underestimated structural national security risk.

In subsequent research, GFM further notes that the emerging "AI power constraint," exemplified by the rapid scaling demands of companies such as NVIDIA, is no longer confined to corporate cost structures or supply chain management. Instead, it is increasingly entering the core of U.S. technology and national security decision-making as an institutional risk factor.

In Where Will America Find Power? and What the U.S. Lacks Is Not Electricity, but the Grid, Cheng emphasizes that the true shortage facing the United States is not generation capacity alone, but the power grid itself—its capacity bottlenecks, construction timeline mismatches, governance mechanisms, and delays in the delivery of critical equipment. He argues that the energy challenge of the AI era is fundamentally a competition in engineering execution and institutional coordination, not a problem solvable by any single technology.

Looking ahead, the AI & Energy research series will expand to include in-depth studies on Global Power Limits, AI's Triple Energy Pressures, Neutral-System Pathways, and Nuclear Energy and Fusion. These forthcoming analyses will explore how energy efficiency gains, electrification, and grid digitalization—while feasible—represent complex and demanding solutions when viewed through the combined lenses of policy timing, engineering cycles, and national security considerations.

GFM is a global financial intelligence ecosystem that transforms investigation and research into strategic assets. Selected GFM research has been distributed via PR Newswire and subsequently republished and cited by multiple international mainstream platforms, demonstrating GFM's inclusion in the global public information circulation system. GFM supports distribution in more than 25 languages worldwide and continues to operate under public scrutiny across languages, markets, and institutional environments.

SOURCE Global Financial Media Inc