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The Trillion-Dollar AI Bottleneck Nobody Is Talking About
PR Newswire
NEW YORK, June 16, 2026
FN Media Group Presents Oilprice.com Market Commentary
NEW YORK, June 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — In March, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Oracle, and Elon Musk’s xAI joined President Trump at the White House. Together, they signed a document that will reshape how AI’s biggest companies operate for years to come. They committed, in writing, to pay for every megawatt of new electricity their AI projects will require and to cover all of the grid infrastructure those projects depend on. Companies mentioned in today’s commentary includes: Bitzero Holdings Inc. (AIBZ), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA), Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL), Dell Technologies Inc. (NYSE: DELL), Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO).
In short, the seven biggest names in tech told the President they would pay whatever it costs to keep AI running. And Bitzero (AIBZ) has already secured what Big Tech needs most for today’s ongoing AI boom. The company controls more than a gigawatt of low-cost power across Norway, Finland, and North Dakota.
All of it was secured years before the March announcement, including in countries where building anything comparable at this scale is no longer possible. And they just announced a major deal with a long-term tenant at their flagship site where, like Big Tech, the tenant has agreed to cover the electricity costs.
The spending numbers from Silicon Valley confirm that the race to secure the power for AI isn’t just talk. The five biggest AI infrastructure providers plan to spend anywhere from $660 billion to $690 billion on capital expenditure in 2026. That figure dwarfs the entire defense budget of nearly every country on Earth, and the vast majority of that money is going specifically toward AI infrastructure.But even with all of that money, AI could soon hit a wall most investors haven’t even noticed yet. There simply isn’t enough power to absorb it.
The Money Is Flowing. The Power Is Years Away.
While many missed the rise of Nvidia in 2023, long before it became the $5 trillion AI darling, the AI boom has spread far beyond chip companies and Big Tech hyperscalers. The obvious AI plays are now well-known and largely priced in. But the AI boom hasn’t slowed down. It’s just moved a layer deeper, into the inputs AI actually runs on, and the biggest input by far today is electricity. Unfortunately, the timeline has given cause for concern to companies that are seeing AI use rising higher by the day.
A new utility-scale power plant would take five to ten years to go from approval to operation. And while nuclear is gaining attention, new nuclear capacity is even slower. Microsoft’s deal to restart the Three Mile Island reactor won’t deliver electricity until 2027 at the earliest, and Google’s first Kairos Power reactor isn’t expected online until 2030. Even the most ambitious project underway can’t outpace the timeline.
Stargate — the $500 billion AI infrastructure venture from OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank — has grown to nearly seven gigawatts of planned capacity, with sites confirmed or under development in Texas, Michigan, and Wisconsin among others. But even Stargate’s success depends on what local power grids can actually support, and most of those gigawatts won’t be generating electricity for years. The Pledge signed in March only committed Big Tech to pay for the new power. It didn’t shorten how long it takes to deliver it. That’s where Bitzero hopes to shorten the gap as AI demand continues to ramp up.
Securing Cheap, Abundant Power in 2026
Bitzero (AIBZ) spent the last four years building exactly what Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta now need to power AI. The company’s flagship facility sits in central Norway, where it draws 100% renewable hydroelectric power at 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly a third of what most U.S. data centers pay today.
Bitzero also manages its own connection to the grid directly, which means the company doesn’t rent its electricity from a utility. It controls its own power supply, which very few public companies can say in 2026. A short time after Bitzero’s facility was approved, Norway closed the door. The country’s regulators capped any new data center project at five megawatts of power — barely enough to run a small server room, and far below the 100-plus megawatts a single AI training facility actually needs. The company’s concessions were locked in before that cap was imposed.
What that means is there are essentially no new entrants who can build at Bitzero’s scale in Norway. The companies that finished their build-outs before the door closed are sitting on something that simply can’t be replicated today — not with capital or political connections. The concessions simply don’t exist anymore.
The Infrastructure Big Tech Can’t Build Fast Enough
The company isn’t just holding power, though. It’s already turning it into the infrastructure the AI boom needs most.But this month, Bitzero officially made its move into the AI data center space after signing a binding letter with a long-term tenant for an AI data center.
The company just signed a binding letter for a 15-year lease with AI cloud provider OneQode for the full 110 megawatts at the Norway site, with first deployment targeted for the first half of 2027. The deal is worth up to $2.6 billion, with 85% of that expected to be net income after OneQode covers electricity costs. That puts the entire flagship facility under a long-term tenant with deployment expected next year, while most operators are still waiting on grid approvals.
Once the Norway facility has those 110 megawatts operational, that would equate to roughly $2-3 billion in market value in today’s AI buildout craze. But that’s not even the company’s largest site.
Finland’s Kokemaki campus has also been planned and has undergone a full DD report by Red Engineering to support up to 520 MW of buildings, with an expansion after that up to the contemplated 1000 MW / 1gigawatt. That makes this one of the largest AI-ready infrastructure footprints anywhere in Europe.
The first 80 megawatts is on track for the first half of 2027, and the high-voltage grid connection has already been confirmed by the local utility. With that kind of massive scale, a single hyperscaler could take hundreds of megawatts and still leave room for additional tenants. That capacity barely exists in North America right now, let alone in a facility that’s already permitted and connected to the grid.
None of this depends on landing another AI contract tomorrow, either. Bitzero’s power assets already generate revenue in a completely different use case. The company runs a profitable Bitcoin mining operation at roughly $50,000 per coin. That’s well below the $75,000-to-$82,000 range most of the industry operates at. That margin comes from the same 3-to-4 cent hydroelectric power that makes the AI opportunity possible.
The Shark Backing This AI Power Play
“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary became a strategic investor in Bitzero before any of this — before the White House Pledge, before Stargate, and before AI infrastructure spending crossed half a trillion dollars. “It’s really a power company,” O’Leary said in a recent interview. “It was able to acquire some very advantageous power contracts over long periods of time, and they can go anywhere they want with that power.”
He’s been clear about why those contracts are more important than ever now. “There is no power on the grid anymore. You’ve got the Bitcoin miners with insatiable demand, and you’ve also got massive demand for AI data centers. These two are going to be fighting for power contracts.” O’Leary highlighted the problem long before most of the market understood what the fight was even about, and Bitzero is positioned as a strong solution at the heart of it.
Other companies to keep an eye on:
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT)
Microsoft is in the middle of the largest infrastructure build-out in its history. The company pledged roughly $80 billion toward AI-enabled data centers in fiscal year 2025, with more than half targeted at U.S. facilities, and has already begun scaling a new AI campus in Wisconsin at a cost exceeding $7 billion. The Mount Pleasant facility alone is designed to house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs in clustered formations for training frontier AI models.
The financial results back up the ambition. In Q1 FY2026, Microsoft posted $77.7 billion in revenue, up 18% year over year, with Azure and other cloud services growing 40%. The company’s commercial backlog hit $392 billion, up 51%, meaning future revenue is largely already booked.
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA)
If there’s a single company that sits at the center of the AI data center story, it’s NVIDIA. The chipmaker reported record Q1 FY2027 revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% year over year, with data center revenue alone hitting $75.2 billion, a 92% jump from the same period last year. CEO Jensen Huang closed out the earnings call with a line that landed as more observation than boast: “Demand has gone parabolic.”
The driver is agentic AI. Where conversational AI tools are relatively token-efficient, coding agents and multi-agent systems can consume anywhere from 5 to 30 times more compute per task. That multiplier effect is running straight through NVIDIA’s order books.
Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL)
Oracle spent most of the last decade being written off as legacy enterprise software. The AI infrastructure buildout has turned that narrative upside down. Q4 FY2026 revenue hit $19.2 billion, up 21% year over year, with Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS) revenue up 93%. The figure that stops people in their tracks is the remaining performance obligation: $638 billion, up $85 billion in a single quarter.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was always NVIDIA’s awkward middle child compared to AWS, Azure, and GCP. That’s changed. The company has been quietly signing multi-billion-dollar AI contracts, including commitments from Meta and NVIDIA itself, and built what it describes as some of the world’s fastest-growing cloud data center capacity.
Dell Technologies Inc. (NYSE: DELL)
Dell’s Q1 FY2027 earnings report, released May 29, stopped the market cold. AI-optimized server revenue hit $16.1 billion in a single quarter — up 757% year over year. Total Q1 revenue came in at $43.8 billion, up 88%, smashing Wall Street consensus by more than $8 billion. The company booked $24.4 billion in AI orders during the quarter and exited with a record $51.3 billion AI backlog. Its active AI customer count surpassed 5,000, up over 50% in six months.
Dell’s position in this story is as the system integrator that actually assembles the hardware and ships it to the data center floor. NVIDIA makes the GPUs, TSMC fabricates the chips, but Dell bundles them into rack-scale AI servers, handles procurement, and manages the deployment at scale.tend to resolve in favor of companies with existing customer relationships and scale logistics infrastructure, which is exactly what Dell has.
Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO)
Broadcom makes the custom AI accelerators — XPUs — that hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and ByteDance design to run specific workloads more efficiently than off-the-shelf GPUs. It also makes the networking chips that connect those accelerators inside large AI clusters. CEO Hock Tan told analysts the company has “line of sight to achieve AI revenue from chips in excess of $100 billion in 2027,” backed by a $73 billion backlog of committed customer orders.
The custom chip story is different from NVIDIA’s in an important way. Broadcom’s customers are designing their own silicon precisely because they want a different price-performance profile than standard GPUs offer — and Broadcom is the company that builds those designs at scale.
By. Charles Kennedy
The AI boom is triggering an unexpected and unprecedented bull run in natural gas and power stocks. If you aren’t paying attention to the energy demands of data centers, you will miss the biggest energy story of the decade. The smart money is already quietly moving into the few companies prepared to power the trillion-dollar AI machine.
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