The Universe Built You From Stardust. China Is Building the Future From Gigawatts. America Is Still Arguing About the Permit.

Carl Sagan famously said that if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. I have been thinking about that line for months, ever since I began writing the chapters on energy and compute in this book. Because Sagan wasn't being whimsical. He was being precise. The atoms in that apple pie — the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen — were forged in the cores of stars that exploded billions of years before our sun existed. Every particle in your body has a cosmic address. And every watt of electricity powering the datacenters racing to build artificial superintelligence has the same lineage. It all started with the Big Bang. It all ends, if we are not careful, with a civilisation that ran out of power before it ran out of ideas.

Energy is not a supporting character in the AI story. It is the protagonist. Without power, there are no datacenters. Without datacenters, there are no frontier models. Without frontier models, there is no AGI. Without AGI, the singularity remains a line on a graph rather than a lived reality. The nations that control energy will control intelligence. And the numbers, when you look at them honestly, are not encouraging for the United States.

In 2024, China added 546 gigawatts of new power capacity. The United States added 51 gigawatts. That is not a gap. That is a chasm. China added more power in a single year than the United States has built in the last five combined. And America's stated need — roughly one million gigawatts by 2030 to meet AI datacenter demand — is being addressed primarily through nuclear plants that produce between one and one-and-a-half gigawatts each, take a decade to permit and construct, and face fierce local opposition at every stage. The math does not work. The timeline does not work. And yet the conversation in Washington continues to unfold as if this is a problem that can be solved by the next committee. (I first ran these same two numbers a week earlier, in economic rather than cosmic terms, in Issue No. 2.)

China has no such committee. It has a plan, a grid, and the political will to execute both at a pace that democratic systems structurally cannot match. This is not a criticism of democracy. It is a description of physics meeting politics. And physics, as always, is indifferent to the outcome.

This issue is a two-country story — America and China. It leaves out the third: a country that generates roughly a fifth of the world's AI training data and owns about 3.5 percent of the compute to process it. I wrote the full version of that asymmetry, refinery metaphor and all, in The Refinery Problem.

SMAC, the Lawsuit & the Second Beginning

In December 1990, I founded SMAC Data Systems on $5,000 spread across four credit cards. No office, no team, no blueprint. Just a gap in the market I had spotted while lugging boxes in a computer warehouse and an obstinate belief that someone had to fill it. The company grew to serve the computer manufacturing and reseller ecosystem in the Washington metro area, and for a while — a good while — it worked. Not smoothly. Not without setbacks. But it worked.

Then came a lawsuit from a disgruntled employee. I didn't know anyone who could help me navigate it. I didn't have the legal infrastructure. I folded the business in 2001. Every cent gone. The company I had built from four credit cards and a warehouse pallet was over in a way that felt both sudden and inevitable, the way all long-building disasters do when they finally arrive.

What I didn't know in 2001 was that in 2004 I would build something even more unlikely. FEDMINE.US was born on a Mac computer, teaching myself MySQL from an O'Reilly subscription, hiring a programmer 4,000 miles away to access data I had loaded myself without knowing how to write a single line of code. The US government spends roughly $800 billion a year. At the time, fewer than a handful of firms were tracking it with any sophistication. That gap was a market. I walked into it alone.

I tell you this because the energy chapter in this book is not abstract to me either. I know what it means to try to build something when the infrastructure isn't there. When the power supply — metaphorical or otherwise — isn't keeping pace with the ambition. The United States is in exactly that position today. It has the ambition. It has the models. It does not yet have the grid.