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The AI boom has an oddly old-fashioned problem. Companies are spending billions of dollars on some of the most advanced computers ever built. Yet one of the hardest pieces of equipment to obtain is based on technology developed more than a century ago: the transformer. In the United States, a typical large power transformer can take roughly 2.5 to three years to procure. Some extra-high-voltage units can take as long as five years . That matters because a data center full of GPUs is useless without the electrical infrastructure needed to power it. The machine behind the electricity A transformer does a simple but essential job: it changes the voltage of electricity. Power needs to travel efficiently across long distances at high voltage, then be converted to appropriate voltage levels before it can be used by buildings, factories and data centers. AI is adding enormous new demand to that system. JLL expects nearly 100 GW of new data-center capacity to be added globally betwe...

Gasoline is expensive again. The U.S. average for regular gasoline was about: $4.10 a gallon on August 19. A year ago, gasoline averaged roughly $3.13 a gallon . For drivers, the problem is obvious. You pull into a gas station. You look at the sign. And filling the tank suddenly costs much more. But there is another question hiding behind that price: Who actually gets your $4? The gas station? The oil company? The refinery? The government? The answer is more complicated than it looks. And right now, one part of the gasoline business is doing particularly well. Start With One Gallon of Gas The U.S. Energy Information Administration breaks the price of gasoline into four major pieces: Crude oil Refining Distribution and marketing Taxes The latest complete monthly breakdown available from the EIA is for May 2026. The average retail price that month was: $4.479 per gallon Here is where that money went. Part of the price Share About Crude oil 51.9% $2.32 Refinin...

  Behind ChatGPT is a much bigger question: who pays for the power grid AI needs? Ask ChatGPT a question. A few seconds later, an answer appears. That's all most of us see. But somewhere behind that answer, GPUs are running. Those GPUs consume electricity. They generate heat, which means they need cooling. The servers need to operate around the clock. And all of that equipment has to live somewhere. Inside a data center . As AI grows, those data centers are getting larger — and their demand for electricity is becoming large enough to affect the power system itself. That leads to a surprisingly personal question: Who pays for all the electricity infrastructure AI needs? The AI company? The data center? The utility? Or could part of the bill eventually reach ordinary households? Data Centers Could Consume More Than 10% of U.S. Electricity In 2026, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published an updated estimate of U.S. data-center electricity consumption. Its...