You may think AI is a bubble but news busting out says differently.

Part of my job is scanning the world wide web for news on energy projects involved commercial and industrial end users. It’s also trying to grasp major trends. And going down rabbit holes of which the internet has many.

Forget the personal computer for only a second and let’s go to the dance floor. I was at my son’s wedding this past weekend and was thrilled to chat with some of his old high school football and college fraternity friends. My son works on the oil and gas side of the energy sector, and one of his old buddies does the same as a consultant.

This young man, very smart and forward-thinking, wasn’t into dancing nor had a date there, so he wanted to chat with Will’s dad who covers the electricity sector. This old guy is thrilled when any young person wants to interact. I stopped dancing long enough to have a nice conversation (there is video out there of the dancing, but you'll never see it). This smart young gentleman does believe AI might prove to be a bubble. He might be right, I noted, but in my opinion there’s too much happening for this not to be a long-term historically relevant movement.

If it’s a bubble, I said, it might be something that goes way, way up here (hands stretching upward as high as me as a short guy can do) to here (still way over my head).

My computer fishing (not to be confused with phishing) around the web has netted too many signs of the times showing the world is taking the rise of AI and its necessary power demand seriously. And they probably will be for a long time.

Here are some of the headlines happening recently which reveal a seismic shift happening at the intersection of power and digital infrastructure. With each headline I will include a link whether it’s from one of our stories or elsewhere.

1)       Ansaldo Energia is back in the USA

The Italian-based power turbine manufacturer moved out of the U.S. new-build power generation market some three decades ago. New power capacity was lagging at the time and there was already so much competition with Siemens, GE and Mitsubishi. Ansaldo is returning through a contract with Pacifico Energy to provide eight gas-fired turbines supporting GW-scale new data center infrastructure under construction in Texas. This return is significant.

2)       Elon Musk invested $1 billion to secure gas-fired power

The never-shy Tesla and SpaceX mastermind and longtime decarbonization advocate has pivoted on energy as quickly as he did politically. Musk quietly acquired APR Energy, according to spare Federal Trade Commission documentation. APR provides mobile gas-fired and diesel power generation for industrial users including data centers and oil and gas operators.

Of course, $1 billion is chump change for the world’s richest man, but both the acquisition and uncharacteristic lack of candor on the deal show he is moving toward speed-to-power solutions for AI and digital infrastructure.

3)       South Korea plans to raise government spending to record $600 billion… and AI is a key reason why

Seoul leadership is putting its money where they believe the future is by raising the 2027 federal budget more than 12% to 821 trillion won (or about US$597 billion). South Korea’s largest year-over-year increased is pivoted on major investment in superconductor chips and other AI-enabling technologies. Asia’s fourth-largest economy is clearly benefiting from the boom, with companies such as Samsung and SK generating profits through demand for supercomputing chips used in AI.

4)       China is way ahead again…on nearly everything

Asia’s biggest economy wants to be the world’s biggest, and is spending and evolving accordingly, whatever the outcome. Researcher Fortune Business Insights estimates China’s AI market about $28 billion US equivalent last year but growing nearly 33% annually to $200+ billion by 2032.

China also intends to match that digital infrastructure growth with cleaner energy. As EnergyTech reported this week, the nation’s installed solar capacity exceeded coal-fired power for the first time ever. And as the Energy Institute noted in its recent World Statistical Review, China is still the world’s biggest industrial polluter but is reducing its carbon intensity at a much faster clip than the U.S. is.

5)       FERC is Pushing Hard for Speed to Power … and President Trump is clashing with his own voters in defense of AI and data centers

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is requiring all the nation’s Independent System Operators—those such as PJM and MISSO which manage the major grid interconnections—to come up with plans to streamline permitting processes for power projects which can facilitate data center and AI growth. FERC through the same directives also is telling hyperscalers to “bring your own generation” and pay a good part of the costs for behind-the-meter power projects which could energize new digital infrastructure build-out. By the 2030s these power plants could be gas-fired, nuclear and supplemented with solar and battery storage to help handle AI models’ transient load fluctuations.

The president is known for blunt criticism for those who don’t like him or his policy priorities—and apparently that includes even Republicans who oppose wide-scale AI factory and data center development growth. More than half of Americans—including 40% of Republicans—think that new data center construction is “somewhat or very bad,” according to a new poll by the Economist and YouGov.

President Trump apparently feels very bipartisan on this issue and called those communities rejecting new data centers as misguided at best, not very bright at worst.

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” he wrote on his Truth Social media post. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti-Data Center movement.”

China! As for the good news, one can only assume the president meant other American communities which will allow new digital infrastructure development. As for the money following the boom, read the next headline.

6)       NVIDIA rules the AI world: GPU leader convinces private equity to commit $500 billion toward future AI and data center construction

In a recent EnergyTech story on “Making Energy Compute,” we reported about NVIDIA’s cohesive role in a $500 billion partnership to accelerate both AI development and correlated energy resources. Only the world’s fastest growing company could bring together a formidable investment portfolio featuring private equity giants at Blackstone, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Apollo, KKR and Brookfield.

Of course, we’re talking about major wheelers and dealers here, so $500 billion might feel like chump change without context. Keep in mind, though, that this capital investment promise is nearly all South Korea’s budget and is more than what the entire U.S. federal budget was less than 50 years ago.

So, while bubbles happen, they rarely involve long-term beliefs and commitments from a majority of political and financial leaders. Sure, the housing bubble was catastrophic in the short term and Great Depression in the long term, but those were speculative and derivative and careless and not tied to something which the entire world believes will be critical to future economic, national security and industrial growth.

I cannot see around the corner, but if there’s a bubble burst in the future this tells me it’s because AI went way, way, way up there and then settled…somewhere way up there.

Those six headlines above move me to think so.