The Real Currency

02 Jul, 2026

"The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."

— William Gibson

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Most of June, I’ve just had too many tabs open. SpaceX went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, ending its first day worth more than Tesla. A few days later, Anthropic filed its own IPO paperwork, chasing nearly a trillion-dollar valuation, all off the back of revenue that’s multiplied fivefold since January. OpenAI’s IPO filing landed a week after that. Three companies. Three "trillion-dollar" dreams. All in the same month, and honestly, after the fourth headline, it stopped feeling like three separate stories. Going more into it, it felt like a long sentence about the same problem lurking beneath the surface. Not intelligence. Not GPUs. Electricity.

Because really, under all those wild valuations is a much less glamorous battle going on in places nobody’s writing trillion-dollar headlines about. Data centers in the US are waiting as long as four years just to hook up to the power grid. Analysts say there’s a looming gap of almost 50 gigawatts of power that AI companies will need by 2028 but won’t have. AI is the most cutting-edge tech on the planet, and the biggest roadblock? Something as old as the Industrial Revolution: can you get enough current to the building?

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That’s what keeps pulling my attention back east. While everyone here has raced to bake “intelligence” into stock prices, China has spent a decade quietly building the hard, physical foundation under all of it. Their installed power capacity crossed 3.96 billion kilowatts this year, growing 15% every year (over 60% of it renewable). Not just keeping up with demand, but staying ahead of it, on purpose, as policy. Every chart I’ve looked up this month says that China’s not trying to win any AI narrative...it’s trying to own every single electron the narrative depends on. And it’s not just power generation; as we all know, China already controls about 90% of the world’s rare earth processing.

Underneath all the ticker symbols and trillion-dollar stories, I will stick to the basics, i.e., To compute, you need power. For power, you need materials. For materials, you need a country willing to sink its money and time into the dull.

Hey there! Thank you for reading...will see you soon before Fable 5 takes over.