Inside the AI power wars

For those steeped in the world of AI development, the major differences between tech giants’ chip strategies are easy enough to see: the speed of Google’s TPUs, the affordability of Amazon’s Trainium, and Nvidia’s market dominance. But those same companies’ respective energy strategies often fly under the radar.

As data center buildouts surge across the U.S., the tech industry is hitting a massive wall: a power grid that can’t move fast enough to support them. In this episode, Shayle sits down with Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, who leads coverage of infrastructure and power at SemiAnalysis, to lift the curtain on the hyper-competitive world of AI energy procurement. 

They cover topics including:

The hyperscaler leaderboard: Why Google remains the most energy-sophisticated tech giant, as others continue to innovate

Why power has effectively become revenue for frontier labs

How Google uses its massive balance sheet to provide financial backstops for Anthropic’s data center buildouts

Why the interconnection queue is forcing AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic to bring their own generation

The sudden market frenzy over modular speed-to-power options—ranging from aeroderivative gas turbines and massive reciprocating engines to billions of dollars of fuel cells

Catalyst: How data centers are complicating transmission expansion

Catalyst: Live from Transition-AI 2026: Inside Google’s massive AI capex

Catalyst: The rise of flexible data centers

Catalyst: AI scaling pathways: On grid, on edge, off grid, off planet