Physical reality constrains digital ambition. That gap is the investment thesis. Critical minerals. Semiconductors. Energy. The constraint always moves.
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Texas’s grid peaked at about 91 gigawatts this summer. In September it excluded 302 gigawatts of power requests from its study. A request to connect isn’t demand. It’s a claim.
America’s first commercial small modular reactor got its construction permit four months early. Nobody has set a date to start building it.
For years the regulator was the hold-up. That’s at least partly out of date. What a project waits on now depends on the kind of reactor.
Restarts wait on grid rights and repair work. At Crane, the scarce asset wasn’t the reactor. It was 760 MW of grid connection rights moved from another plant.
Advanced reactors wait on fuel. Big reactors wait on steel and years of building.
Part 3: williamdavid.substack.com/p/…
Oregon paused the state air and water permits data centers need until July 1, 2027. The air permit covers their backup diesel generators. Texas’s environmental regulator paused data center permits on Sept 21. Two states in a month, same lever, outside the grid queue.
Musk says his companies will build and run Terafab. TSMC’s chairman says any fab TSMC joins has to be run by TSMC. It looks like a fight over control. It’s really about what’s scarce. Money buys the building. Running a new process at yields customers accept takes years.
The full argument, and what would prove it wrong: substack.com/@williamdavid/n…
I write about the physical bottlenecks markets price last.
I write The Chokepoint, on where the real bottlenecks are hiding in AI, energy and critical minerals. Part 2: williamdavid.substack.com/p/…
GE Vernova added 33 GW of gas turbine commitments in the first half of 2026. Its guide for the second half is nine.
Part of that gap is mechanical. Most of the rest is the difference between a reservation and an order.
A heavy-duty turbine ordered today is commissioned in ‘32 or ‘33, on GE Vernova’s own words. Under the turbine sit castings with a three-year equipment lead time. Beside it, pipe with its own clock.
The Power Clock, Part 2: williamdavid.substack.com/p/…
The line from ASML’s call worth keeping: value-based pricing talks with key customers are done. The effect shows partly in 2027 and fully from 2028, the same window in which ASML says its supply won’t meet demand. The price lands while the shortage is still running.
In July, Nvidia sold off because AI was getting cheaper.
The model layer might be. The packaging layer isn’t. The memory layer isn’t.
A map of where the AI constraint actually lives, from the silicon up:
A data center asking to connect to the grid once faced one question: how much power?
Now there’s a harder one: how will it behave when the grid is disturbed?
NERC has documented big data centers dropping off after routine faults.
The grid isn’t just counting megawatts anymore.
What NERC asked for, what it didn’t require, and where it could lead: substack.com/@williamdavid/n…
Texas's grid operator just sorted its biggest power requests.
66.4 GW Base Load. 126-128 GW Studied. 302.2 GW excluded.
The grid's all-time peak is about 91 GW.
A request to connect is a claim on future power. It is not a load.
Excluded doesn't mean fake. But the 474 GW headline and what the grid is actually studying are very different things.
The test is ERCOT's December 10 verification report.
The Power Clock, Part 1: williamdavid.substack.com/p/…