This week we’ll be focused on the news out of Washington DC and what it means for tech. The latest Senate draft of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill would gut clean-energy credits, inflating the grid costs that power AI. The question is no longer whether the build-out will be fast—it’s whether Congress will make it expensive.

It was a surprisingly news-packed week last week. Micron Technology (MU:NASDAQ) proved the AI-memory arms race is real, lifting gross-margin guidance and daring us to model north of 60 percent. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE:NYSE) countered at Discover, pitching autonomous, Nvidia-laced infrastructure anchored by Nvidia (NVDA:NASDAQ) that promises to spare administrators the grunt work that gnaws at every data-center budget.

All our Week Ahead notes are live at epistrophy.beehiiv.com. And it’s pretty! Check it out.

As always, I’m focused on three things:
1) Technology-driven change;
2) the latest in innovation and startup trends, and;
3) stock fraud.

Companies Discussed

• Companies Discussed

• The Week D.C. Unplugged AI

  • How OBBBA Could Cripple AI Growth

• Epistrophy In The News

• 📆 of Epistrophy Events

• Availability This Week

The Week D.C. Unplugged AI

How OBBBA Could Cripple AI Growth

“Remember this chart” That was Elon Musk’s entire caption on June 27 tweet, graphing China’s new electricity generation blowing past that of the United States. The implication wasn’t subtle. The future belongs to whoever can power it. And the U.S., despite its leadership in AI hardware, is falling behind where it might count most: electricity.

That challenge is already here. Oracle (ORCL: NYSE) has broken ground on a 1.2-gigawatt data center campus outside Abilene, Texas, as part of a massive infrastructure project known as “Project Stargate.” The site will support Oracle’s AI and cloud operations and eventually span up to 4 million square feet across eight buildings. Its power draw—comparable to that of a mid-sized American city—has triggered grid-wide planning efforts at ERCOT, which is now studying new high-voltage transmission lines across West Texas. Oracle’s energy partners expect to connect the campus to dedicated substations and begin delivering power by mid-2026.

The market is focused on the challenges of chip supply – but power might be a bigger problem. Nvidia, Microsoft (MSFT: NASDAQ), Google (GOOG: NASDAQ), and Amazon (AMZN: NASDAQ) are laying out plans for massive GPU clusters—each drawing tens or hundreds of megawatts. And yet, in 2023, the U.S. added just 20 GW of new generation capacity. 

NextEra Energy (NEE: NYSE) (nee “Florida Power & Light”)* projects AI and electrification will require at least 50 GW annually. That’s a 150% shortfall—and it’s widening. Even if generation ramps up, transmission and permitting delays can take a decade to overcome. Without a shock to the system, deployment will stall.

Does President Donald Trump get this? President Trump has proposed repealing large portions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in his  forthcoming “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA). Senate negotiators are signaling that they will follow Trump’s lead, unwinding what he describes as “green new scam” subsidies. The IRA, signed into law in 2022, created or expanded tax credits for solar, wind, nuclear, carbon capture, hydrogen, and battery storage. Trump’s proposed repeal would likely eliminate the clean electricity production and investment tax credits (PTC and ITC) – even on nuclear energy – curtailing private-sector incentives to finance new renewable energy projects.

Trump has been pushing hard against this, following his Truth Social post last weekend declaring “I HATE ‘GREEN TAX CREDITS’ IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL”. Over the weekend Trump was reportedly personally involved lobbying Senators to strip these incentives out of the bill.

The impact on clean energy deployment would be substantial. Since the passage of the IRA, developers have announced over $321 billion in U.S. energy manufacturing and power generation projects. Many of these rely directly on IRA incentives for economic viability—especially long-duration battery storage and green hydrogen, which remain more expensive than fossil-fueled alternatives. A repeal could freeze investment pipelines, stall permitting applications, and raise the cost of capital for renewable developers, who have priced IRA subsidies into project finance models through 2032.

Sure, Trump has also called for expanding domestic oil, gas, and coal production, and removing permitting advantages for renewable energy. This includes rolling back executive orders that prioritized environmental reviews for transmission infrastructure and reversing the use of the Defense Production Act to boost heat pump and transformer manufacturing. 

Those projects, at best, won’t produce energy until well after Trump’s Presidency. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s congressional allies have already introduced bills to claw back key IRA provisions, including the Clean Electricity Investment Credit and the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit—both of which underwrite new solar, wind, and battery capacity.

Owning the libs? Sure.

But while they bicker about this bill, grid bottlenecks are slowing hyperscale buildouts everywhere. At Giga Texas, Elon Musk admitted in June 2024 that Nvidia’s H100s “would have just sat in a warehouse” because Tesla had “no place to send them to turn them on.” In Virginia, Microsoft recently requested additional time to bring online substations for several AI campuses. In Oregon, Amazon is negotiating directly with local regulators for dedicated grid access and water rights. Meta’s plan to power a new AI site with nuclear energy fell apart after a rare bee species was discovered on the land.

Big Tech’s long range answer is nuclear. Amazon Web Services, bought Talen Energy’s (TLN: NASDAQ) 1,200-acre Cumulus data center campus in Pennsylvania, next to a 2.5 GW nuclear plant. The plan: develop 960 MW of AI compute capacity with a 10-year carbon-free power contract. Microsoft (MSFT: NASDAQ) and Google (GOOG: NASDAQ) are pursuing advanced small modular reactors and fusion power deals. 

But enthusiasm doesn’t generate electrons. NuScale’s (SMR: NYSE) light-water SMR design remains the only next-gen reactor approved in the U.S.—and that process took 42 months. Others haven’t even begun. From permitting to operation, nuclear can’t help in the near term.

Natural gas won’t fill the gap either. GE Vernova (GEV: NYSE) has already doubled its gas turbine order volume this year. Mitsubishi projects global turbine demand will rise 50% by 2026. But the timelines are brutal. New gas plants require over six years to build, with capital costs approaching $2,800/kW. And grid interconnection remains a labyrinth. Even if the industry wanted to build enough gas capacity to support AI, it couldn’t do it fast enough. 

We need renewables to bridge the gap. 

That bridge is being built—by battery storage. Companies like Fluence Energy (FLNC: NASDAQ), Ameresco (AMRC: NYSE), and Generac (GNRC: NYSE) are deploying batteries and solar-plus-storage systems with 12-month lead times, modular footprints, and costs well below gas peakers. NextEra’s data shows firmed renewables can deliver at $25–$75 per MWh. Gas runs $90–$115. SMRs could hit $130–$150. Storage wins on both speed and price—and it’s being deployed now. But the limitation is intermittency. Solar and batteries can’t yet replace baseload at night or across seasons.

This is a race. China is winning and President Trump is helping the US lose. Even threats to the IRA have slowed renewable project starts—especially in wind, where permitting delays and rising steel costs have caused a 40% increase in project prices since 2021. COP28 goals to triple global renewables by 2030 are now at risk. Solar remains the bright spot—projected to grow 34% in 2024—but the grid can’t absorb that growth without new transmission. It’s not just a question of generation. It’s a question of connection.

This is a race—and Trump is trying to cut the legs out from under the only team that can run it. Even the threat of repealing the Inflation Reduction Act has chilled renewable investment. Wind project costs are up 40% since 2021, as developers grapple with steel prices, permitting delays, and policy uncertainty. Solar is holding on, projected to grow 34% this year, but the grid can’t absorb that growth without new transmission—most of it reliant on IRA-backed incentives. The goals laid out at COP28 to triple global renewable capacity by 2030 are slipping out of reach.

And still, the paradox worsens: Nvidia’s results soar, hyperscalers keep ordering GPUs, and AI’s electricity appetite keeps rising. But the U.S. grid isn’t scaling with it. Unless clean, firm power deployment triples, the AI buildout will stall—not because of supply chains or regulation, but because of raw physical constraint. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” doesn’t just gut clean energy subsidies. OBBBA dooms the only power sources fast and cheap enough to support America’s AI ambitions. The result isn’t just policy failure—it’s national decline by infrastructure starvation.

* see what I did there?

Epistrophy In The News

On Yahoo Finance’s “Closing Bell” with Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton (great show and a huge audience!), I noted that Micron has “never cracked 60 percent margins,” and that my models hinge on whether its high-bandwidth memory can push the ceiling higher. We walked through why HBM payloads dwarf commodity DRAM and how rising capital intensity could still throttle free cash flow. Watch the eight-minute segment here.

📆 of Epistrophy Events

Availability This Week

It’s a holiday-shortened stretch, heavy on policy, light on earnings. I’m in San Francisco all week and available to talk Big Beautiful Bill, power constraints or any lingering HBM puzzles.

Written reports are available to clients, with video summaries on YouTube, and of course our popular summaries of the summaries on Instagram and TikTok and YouTubeShorts.

I hope these notes are helpful to you. I’d love to discuss them further and, as always, comments, questions and ideas are appreciated. If you have a friend whom you think might benefit from this note, have them reach out and I’ll put them on the list.