THE GRID
A January 2026 report from Bloom Energy put a number on the thing everyone already sensed. U.S. data center energy demand will nearly double between 2025 and 2028 — from 80 gigawatts to 150 gigawatts. To understand the scale, adding 70 gigawatts of near-constant electricity demand in three years is roughly equivalent to plugging in a country with the energy needs of Spain.
This week, Gartner published its latest forecast, and it filled in more detail. Worldwide data center electricity consumption will rise from 448 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 980 terawatt-hours by 2030. The driver? AI-optimized servers. Their power use is projected to rise nearly fivefold — from 93 TWh in 2025 to 432 TWh in 2030. By 2030, those servers will represent 44% of total data center power consumption, up from 21% today.
What Wall Street Will Do To Your 401(k) During The SpaceX IPO
SpaceX goes public this summer.
Nasdaq quietly rewrote its rules to fast-track it into the index. The S&P 500 may follow.
Trillions in index funds will be forced to buy it. To make room, they sell other things.
Those things are in your 401(k).
You will not be asked.
You will find out in September.
You open the statement. The number is lower than July.
You call. Forty minutes on hold.
There was an automated sale. The fund had to make room for SpaceX.
Who approved it? The prospectus did. Years ago. When you signed up.
Can you reverse it?
No.
That is the call most savers will make this fall.
The ones holding physical gold will not.
Physical gold inside a 401(k) cannot be sold by a fund manager. The IPO cannot touch it.
The IRS allows it.
Our free 2026 Gold Guide shows you how. [Tax-free. Penalty-free.]
Be the one who already moved.
Not the one on the phone in September.
Inside, the step-by-step process to move a portion of your retirement before the sale hits your account.
The IEA added an important wrinkle in its April 2026 update. Power consumption per AI task is falling fast — efficiency is improving at a pace the IEA called "unprecedented in energy history." Sounds like good news. But more people are using AI every month. And the new use cases — AI agents, continuous inference pipelines, real-time video generation — are far more energy-intensive than a chat query. The total electricity bill keeps climbing even as the per-task cost drops.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy put it plainly in his annual shareholder letter: "AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where the current growth is unprecedented and the future growth even bigger." His company is spending $200 billion on capex this year to back that conviction. The electricity to power that capex has to come from somewhere. That's the question the market hasn't fully answered.
Virginia already gets 40% of its electricity consumed by data centers. Twelve percent in Iowa. Eleven percent in Oregon. These are not rounding errors — they are structural shifts in regional power markets.
The AI power story isn't a future risk to model. It's a present reality showing up in utility earnings, grid operator filings, and electricity bills right now.
VOLTAGE
Ford Pivots to the Grid — and It Makes Complete Sense
A few years ago, Ford bet big on electric vehicles. It built giant battery factories in Kentucky and Michigan. Then EV demand slowed, and those factories sat underutilized. Ford had a problem: billions in sunk costs with no customers filling the pipeline.
This month, that problem became a solution. Ford officially launched Ford Energy — a new subsidiary that will use those same factories to build grid-scale battery storage systems. Target capacity: 20 gigawatt-hours per year. First deliveries begin in 2028.
24 GW
Ford's timing is deliberate. The U.S. battery storage market is in full boom. Developers plan to add 24 GW of utility-scale storage this year. Data centers are driving a new use case — AI facilities need batteries to buffer against grid instability and store renewable energy for peak demand periods. Industry projections suggest data centers could account for 83% of all behind-the-meter commercial and industrial storage deployments by 2030.
Two days after unveiling Ford Energy's product line, Ford signed a deal with EDF giving the French energy giant the right to procure up to 4 GWh of Ford's new DC Block battery systems per year. EDF has grid-scale projects across North America. Ford has the manufacturing capacity. The partnership makes sense from both sides.
Ford also brings a domestic manufacturing angle that matters for tax credit eligibility. Its systems are assembled in the U.S., built to facilitate Section 48E Investment Tax Credit eligibility, and designed to sidestep the import restrictions hitting Chinese battery suppliers. That's a real edge in a market where FEOC compliance is becoming a dealbreaker for federally funded projects.
Ford didn't pivot to batteries because it's optimistic about clean energy. It pivoted because it had factories and the grid needed them. That is exactly the kind of industrial logic that wins in energy infrastructure cycles.
Investors are watching this fast growing tech company.
Meet $MODE, the disruptor turning phones into income generators.
Elon Musk said that “universal income will be necessary if AI takes over most human jobs,” and Mode is pioneering privatized UBI powered by technology. Their 3-year 32,481% revenue growth ranked them the #1 software company on Deloitte’s fastest-growing companies list.
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.
Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.
The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.
WIRED IN
Friday Signals: Storage, Chips, and Spending
The American energy sector announced $100 billion in battery storage investments targeting deployment by 2030, according to the American Clean Power Association. LG Energy Solution Vertech expects to deliver 16.5 GWh from its Michigan plant in 2026 alone. Globally, 353 GWh of new energy storage capacity is expected to come online this year. Global BESS shipments grew 75.5% in 2025 to 421 GWh. The U.S. ended 2025 with 137 GWh of utility-scale storage. The industry is tracking toward 600 GWh by 2030 — nearly a fivefold increase in five years. The economics are no longer speculative. Storage is now the second-fastest-growing category of new grid capacity behind solar.
Amazon's Trainium 3 chip is nearly fully subscribed for 2026, CEO Andy Jassy told investors during Q1 earnings. The chip delivers about 30% better price-performance than comparable GPUs, Jassy said. That detail matters for the energy map: more efficient chips running in Amazon's data centers mean lower power draw per unit of compute. But near-full subscription means more chips deployed, not fewer. AWS revenue hit $37.59 billion in Q1, growing 28% year-over-year — the fastest pace in 15 quarters. The cloud business is growing into its infrastructure spend. That's different from Meta's situation, which raised capex with no near-term product timeline.
CATL raised $5 billion in Hong Kong tied to its "In Europe, for Europe" manufacturing plan. The world's largest battery maker is scaling its Debrecen, Hungary plant from 40 GWh to 100 GWh and funding new R&D. Meanwhile, CATL also announced plans to invest 5 billion yuan in a new 40 GWh sodium-ion battery plant in Fujian. Sodium-ion is significant: it avoids the lithium supply chain entirely, uses no cobalt or nickel, and is safer for stationary grid storage. If costs come down as expected, it could reshape the economics of grid-scale storage by the end of the decade.
Microsoft remains capacity-constrained through at least 2026, CFO Amy Hood told investors. Despite setting 2026 capex at roughly $80 billion — well above analyst estimates — the company cannot yet meet demand for GPU, CPU, and storage infrastructure. Microsoft's cloud contract backlog reached $460 billion in Q1, roughly double the $240 billion reported at end of Q4 2025. The constraint isn't spending. It's supply chains and grid connections. That backlog represents deferred revenue waiting on power that hasn't been delivered yet. Every month of delay is a month of revenue sitting in a queue.
