The Infrastructure Beneath Intelligence: Power, Policy, and Strategy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Late 2022 marked a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence (AI), as the public release of ChatGPT accelerated its transition from a research tool to a mainstream commercial application. Supporting this transition, a critical infrastructure—data centers—expanded rapidly. Built to train and deploy AI models, data centers are reshaping electricity demand. By 2023, they consumed more than 4 percent of US electricity, and their share is expected to grow significantly by 2028 as AI workloads increase.