The Bottleneck Century: Power, permits, and the slow build of AI infrastructure

The Bottleneck Century is a professional non-fiction pocketbook written from the vantage point of early 2026—when AI infrastructure stopped being a software story and became a hard-constraint story.The next decade will be shaped less by model breakthroughs than by what the physical world can actually deliver: grid interconnection, transformer and switchgear lead times, power quality, cooling water and heat rejection, permitting, fiber routes, latency budgets, and the regulatory friction that governs every megawatt added to the map. This pocketbook connects the technical reality—PUE, RTT, harmonics and compliance standards such as IEEE Std 519—with the business consequences: capex timing, stranded capacity risk, reliability trade-offs, and the fragile economics of “AI at scale.”Built for executives, investors, operators, and policy-facing teams, The Bottleneck Century translates complex infrastructure constraints into decision-grade frameworks—what to measure, where bottlenecks hide, and how to stress-test vendor claims before they become board-level surprises. It is compact by design: a field-ready reference for a century defined by physical limits. Read more