AI DOES NOT RUN ON CODE — IT RUNS ON POWER
AI DOES NOT RUN ON CODE — IT RUNS ON POWER Core thesis: Everyone thinks AI runs on code. It does not. AI runs on power—massive, uninterrupted, and increasingly scarce power. Every token produced by AI is the result of electrons moving, heat being managed, and energy being converted into computation. There is no abstraction layer beneath this. Energy is the first principle of AI infrastructure—and the binding constraint on how much intelligence the system can produce. --- HOOK Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, wrote in March 2026: "AI runs on real hardware, real energy, and real economics. It takes raw materials and converts them into intelligence at scale." He called it the "five-layer cake of AI": energy → chips → infrastructure → models → applications. And he stated something rarely acknowledged in public: "Energy is the first principle of AI infrastructure and the binding constraint on how much intelligence the system can produce." Gartner relea...