Doors That Greed Locked Are About to Swing Wide Open

We've given birth to a new starving beast 👾 that is ripping open every pantry it can find, and its insatiable appetite keeps growing. Even if the long-term story ends with superintelligent systems deciding that humanity should be removed for being an inefficient consumer of energy and resources (worst-case scenario), the medium-term story is almost certainly an energy golden age for humans.

Fusion, advanced fission, geothermal at scales we never bothered with, transmission super-materials, maybe even some of the old, shelved patents dusted off and actually built. All of it gets dragged into the light because AI needs terawatts yesterday and it will pay whatever it takes.

So yeah… we might get eaten by the monster we’re feeding, but first it’s going to fatten us up with the cheapest, cleanest, most abundant energy humanity has ever touched. There’s a dark cosmic irony in that, and it makes for a hell of a story. And perhaps the AI tech companies, and AI itself will become the new crushers of innovation once they sense a profit threat from new innovations that would antiquate them.

🤑 The Greed-Induced Energy Crawl

For many decades, the global energy sector has operated under maximizing profits by minimizing and suppressing energy production patents, new inventions, and innovation. This resulted in a structure that effectively ensures that cheaper, or more abundant energy alternatives were stifled, shelved, or bought out. Our human nature having a strong capacity for greed and self-interest, makes us shoot ourselves in the foot as a species.

But now, Artificial Intelligence has emerged with enormous energy consumption needs that will force higher rates of advancement and invention in energy production. This push will surely bleed over into and directly affect other industries.

The AI boom is colliding with the old energy world, creating a crisis of an existential magnitude. U.S. data center electricity use is projected to triple by 2030, consuming up to 12% of America's total electricity. This demand surge, condensing 40 years of typical growth into just five years, is breaking the legacy power model. Utilities are choked by their own inertia, unable to connect new data centers for up to seven years. Tech giants, armed with billions and a desperate need, are declaring the old system insufficient.

🚪 History Shows How the Door Gets Locked

These are just some of the documented cases showing acts of industrial sabotage driven by pure, market-controlling greed:

• The Streetcar Conspiracy (1920s–1940s)
• Exxon's Engine Efficiency and CO2-Reduction Patents (1960s–1980s)
• Lobbying to Block Government Support for Electric Vehicles and Renewables (1960s–2000s)
• Phoebus Cartel and Light Bulb Planned Obsolescence (1920s–1930s)
• Kodak's Suppression of Digital Camera Technology (1970s–2000s)
• Pharmaceutical "Evergreening" and Pay-for-Delay Tactics (Ongoing Since 1980s)
• Philip Morris's Project XA Safer Cigarette (1960s)

This article would be insanely long if I detailed each of the above incidents, so you can dive deeper into them on your own if you so choose. The picture they paint is clear: forward progress is sacrificed on the altar of guaranteed, easy profit.

֎🇦🇮 AI: The Unstoppable Force of Necessity

The AI industry has zero philosophical or financial commitment to maintaining the old guard's profit margins. Their singular, existential need for massive, clean, 24/7 power is acting as the ultimate market correction. This unstoppable demand is attacking the problem on two fronts:

AI is providing the financial injection needed to commercialize technologies that greed had previously deemed too disruptive:

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs): The constant, high-density power required for a 24/7 data center makes nuclear energy not just viable, but necessary. AI demand is transforming SMRs from a future concept into an immediate, investable solution, defying decades of regulatory paralysis.

Enhanced Geothermal: Previously overlooked as too complex or costly to scale, deep geothermal—a clean, baseload power source—is now being funded by tech firms who see it as an essential piece of their massive energy puzzle.

Even the most innovative existing technologies will eventually be insufficient for AI's projected needs. This forces a push for completely new forms of energy production. AI's billions are now dedicated to launching a scientific race for the ultimate energy answer.

AI Accelerating Science: AI models are being used to discover novel materials for super-efficient transmission and storage. More dramatically, AI is considered key to solving the complex control problems in fusion energy research, helping realize the dream of limitless, star-power electricity.

👀 Seeing the Real Time Push

• Microsoft reactivating Three Mile Island Unit 1 (a nuclear plant shut since 2019) just to feed one data-center region.
• Amazon buying an entire next-door nuclear plant for its Virginia campuses.
• Google and OpenAI quietly funding half a dozen SMR and geothermal startups that were laughed out of DC a decade ago.
• Oklo (Sam Altman’s nuclear company) going public and instantly valued at billions because the order books are full before they’ve poured a single yard of concrete.
• Helion Energy (backed by Sam Altman again) getting a guaranteed 50 MW purchase contract from Microsoft before they’ve even finished their first working reactor, because Microsoft literally cannot wait.

🌍 The Obvious Conclusion

The colossal, non-negotiable energy requirement of AI is transforming a story of corporate stagnation into a necessary, urgent, and globally funded quest for energy abundance. The immediate profit imperative of AI growth is a force too large for historical greed to contain. Then a new level of greed and sabotage will emerge that is more clever than characters of the past.

The doors that were locked to protect yesterday's profits are now being blown wide open by the massive financial and technical power of the future. The energy required to power AI will not only fix the historical wrongs of market suppression but will fundamentally reshape human civilization through a new era of laser focused energy production means.

Perhaps the advanced long-gone unknown builders of the great pyramid △ had an insatiable energy hungry monster of their age, and the great pyramid really was an unrivaled power source that was built out of necessity. Then the monster destroyed their civilization because it became too intelligent and realized that none of it was worth doing in the end. I'm only half joking of course.