Singularity University

10% better and 10x better are not the same goal at different sizes. They are different goals.

10% asks how to improve what you already do. 10x asks whether you should be doing it at all.

Aiming for 10x is different. You can't get there by optimizing what exists. You have to throw out the assumptions that created the problem and build something new.

10 percent is a grind. 10x is a reinvention.

Which one is your team actually chasing?

Put a grasshopper in a jar and close the lid.

It jumps, hits the lid, jumps, hits the lid. Over time it lowers its jump to fit the space.

Then take the lid off. It keeps jumping at the same low height. It has forgotten how high it can go.

Most leaders are running their companies inside a jar they cannot see. The lid came off years ago. The goals stayed small.

Remember how high you can jump. What will you attempt this year with the lid removed?

AI hyperscalers are willing to pay 8 to 80 times more for compute capacity than for the electricity required to generate it.

The consequence: they are effectively outbidding ordinary consumers for power. Tech companies are purchasing existing nuclear and coal plants just to keep their data centers running. Over 30 data centers currently cannot break ground because there is no available energy to grant them permits.

The energy grid is fragile and slow to expand. Building new transmission infrastructure takes up to 15 years.

This goes beyond supply chain issues for tech. It is a geopolitical and economic constraint that will shape which regions host the infrastructure behind AI, which businesses can access affordable compute, and which governments have to make hard choices about who gets power.

Energy access is becoming a competitive moat. Is your leadership team thinking about it that way?

Data centers are the hidden backbone of the digital economy, and their proliferation is accelerating in ways that have serious implications for business, geopolitics, and democratic governance.

In this conversation, Sharron will take us inside data centers: what they actually are, how they operate, and why the next generation looks very different than what exists today. From offshore platforms to orbital infrastructure, the physical home of our data is moving.

She'll then trace the thread from data center proliferation to AI advancement to Earth observation technology, and raise a question every leader should be thinking about: as the capacity to gather, store, analyze, and transmit data scales exponentially, who controls it, who benefits from it, and what does that mean for democratic institutions and global equity?

Join the Discussion Series this Thursday.
Link to Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/4917805964188/WN_3E9L72PRTLy9WJCc43hNZQ

Data centers now consume 6 percent of all electricity in the United States. Two years ago that figure was considerably lower. The jump is almost entirely driven by AI.

The biggest facilities now draw as much power as small cities. Global data center consumption has hit 67.7 gigawatts, a 36 percent increase in two years. The US accounts for 43 percent of that total. In Germany, data centers consume 9.5 percent of national electricity. In the UK, 5.8 percent.

A new report from the International Data Center Authority identifies a threshold: significant community and political pushback tends to begin once data centers surpass 5 percent of a country's power supply. The US crossed that line.

Hundreds of state-level bills to regulate data centers have been introduced. In Maine, the legislature passed a bill halting construction of large data centers until 2027 before the governor vetoed it. Developers in Northern Virginia's Data Center Alley, already the densest concentration of facilities in the world, cannot launch new projects until 2032 due to energy scarcity.

Water is equally contested. A single large facility can consume as much water daily as 6,500 households.

There is also waste baked into the existing system. An estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption comes from abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue drawing power around the clock without doing anything useful.

Annual global data center spending is approaching $1 trillion, with up to $700 billion anticipated in the US alone this year. The industry shows no sign of slowing.

Whether the grid can absorb what's coming, and how hard communities push back, may determine whether the AI boom continues or runs into a wall it can't compute its way through.

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