Every AI data center needs power, and every power plant needs a step-up transformer to connect to the grid. If you ordered one in 2021, it arrived in under 500 days. Today it takes more than 1,120 days. A large transformer core is made of grain-oriented electrical steel that spends about five days in a 1,200°C annealing furnace. Only one US company makes that steel: Cleveland-Cliffs. Inside a bell annealing furnace, coils of iron with about 3% silicon stand on end in hydrogen while the furnace heats them about 15 to 20°C an hour. It takes two to three days to reach 1,200°C. As the coils heat up, tiny particles that pin the grains in place slowly dissolve, and about one grain in a million starts growing and swallows its neighbors. Then the coils sit at 1,200°C for 20 to 40 hours. Grains that started 0.01 mm across end up 10 mm wide, nearly all pointing the same way. That alignment cuts the power a transformer core loses as heat. Cleveland-Cliffs can supply about 12 to 20% of what the US needs, by DOE's estimate. China was in a similar spot before 2000: its only volume producer covered 30% of demand. The few foreign companies that could make the high-grade version refused to license their process. Baosteel spent ten years on research and made its first good coil in 2008. By 2013 it could make 300,000 tons a year, three times what all of China made before 2000. I build chemical plants. If you're in hard-tech, chances are you are now competing with AI data centers for the same grid equipment.