Economics Working Notes

The Power Draw

The energy indicator, promoted to a first-class instrument: how power constraint scores across the AI build-out, read from the filings.

The Instruments · Energy & Power

The Power Draw

Energy is one of the six fragility indicators. It is also the one the market underweights and the build-out cannot escape — every token has a physical bind. This promotes it from a column on the scorecard to an instrument of its own, read the same way: from the filings.

The reading today

~40
MEAN ENERGY SCORE / 100
across 49 scored names · the calmest of the six indicators
75
HOTTEST · ADBE
the labs and the utility, not the chips, run hottest
10
CALMEST · CSCO
low physical-power exposure, per filings

Read straight, energy is quiet — a mean near 40 on a 0–100 fragility scale, calmer than capex-versus-demand (~65) or demand durability (~57). But the distribution is the story: the pressure concentrates exactly where power demand is most acute.

Where energy pressure concentrates

NextEra (NEE) · the utility64
OpenAI65
Anthropic63
xAI60
TSMC (TSM) · fabrication57
Nvidia (NVDA)50

Where it reads calm

Cisco (CSCO)10
Palantir (PLTR)12
Intel (INTC)18
Netflix (NFLX)19
UiPath (PATH)20

That split is the honest signal. The model labs and the one pure-play utility on the tape carry the highest energy readings; software and networking carry the lowest. Power constraint is not a market-wide fragility yet — it is a frontier fragility, sitting on the names actually pouring megawatts into the build-out.

What the indicator measures

Scored from each company’s filings, where disclosed: fab and data-center energy intensity, power draw and power-purchase exposure, energy as a share of cost of goods, and the diminishing-returns curve on efficiency (does each new generation of compute buy less output per watt?). Where a company does not disclose the underlying figure — and most do not disclose fab kWh-per-wafer or energy-as-%-of-COGS — the score carries a NOT SOURCED label rather than an invented number, exactly as every desk indicator does.

Why this is v1, and honest about it. Today’s energy score is company-level, read from SEC filings. That is real, but it is the shallow end. The deep signal in power lives one layer down — in the deals: power-purchase agreements, utility joint ventures, grid-interconnect queues, and the megawatt commitments behind each data center. That layer is not in a 10-K; it is in utility filings, project financings, and PPA disclosures. Building it is next week’s work — and it is the lane where the strongest independent energy-finance analysts already operate.

The build roadmap

  1. Surface the existing energy indicator as its own instrument. DONE · this page The 49 filing-scored readings, the frontier-concentration finding, the methodology.
  2. The deal layer. A data table of disclosed AI-power deals — PPAs, utility JVs, on-site generation, nuclear restarts — each tied to its primary source, the way the financing-edges ledger ties every recycling edge to an accession.
  3. The megawatt tally. Committed data-center power against grid capacity, by region, from utility and interconnect filings — a sourced answer to “can the grid actually deliver the build-out the market has priced?”
  4. The falsifier. State, in advance, the condition that would prove the power thesis wrong — e.g. interconnect queues clearing faster than capex grows — and put it on the receipts ledger like every other desk call.
  5. Promote to first-class. Add to the nav, seal into the provenance manifest, and launch with a Dispatch piece and a flare card — a full instrument, not a scaffold.
Sources note (v1). Energy scores from the published company sheets on the 68-name tape (indicator 5 of 6), read from FY2023–FY2025 filings. Distribution figures computed from those scores. No power-deal or megawatt figures appear on this page yet — those arrive with step 2, each primary-sourced, or they do not appear at all.
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