How the U.S. Is Taking Over Global Energy Flows in 2026

The AI Trade Is an Energy Trade

Gary Cohn, IBM vice chairman and former director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC's Squawk Box this week that AI-driven energy demand is one of the primary forces sustaining equity market momentum — that markets would be struggling without it. That is not a forecast. It is a confession. Capital has found a new speculative frontier, and its raw input is gigawatts. Every new data center is a claim on the grid, on water, on land, and on the communities that host them. The AI trade is an energy trade, and the energy is not clean, not free, and not democratically governed.

Public Infrastructure, Private Returns

The pattern is consistent: public research money, public utilities, and war-zone grids are being wired into corporate AI infrastructure as test beds. At the University of California San Diego, Alderbuck Energy is deploying its Nexus Power Unit — an 800 VDC solid-state transformer — at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, with backing from the California Energy Commission. State dollars are validating hardware built to serve dense, variable AI workloads. On June 24, Tigo Energy (NASDAQ: TYGO) announced that Ukrainian utility YASNO, operating under active conflict, has deployed its Predict+ AI platform to manage grid reliability. We are told this is modernization. The structural reality is extraction — public risk, private upside, and a wartime utility repurposed as a product demo.

The Nuclear Default

Canada's federal government is making a structural bet on nuclear power to meet rising demand, according to MarketScale's reporting. The corporate framing calls this a sustainability play. The material conditions say otherwise: nuclear is capital-intensive, centralized, and slow. It locks in incumbent utilities and forecloses the kind of democratic, distributed energy architecture a just transition requires. When states reach for nuclear to manage AI-driven load growth, they are not solving the energy question — they are answering to the financiers who built the demand.

What to watch next: whether California's backing of Alderbuck translates into procurement preference for public utilities, whether YASNO's deployment becomes a template for grid management under climate and conflict stress, and whether Canada's nuclear pivot accelerates or stalls under cost pressure. The Devdiscourse headline — "Reimagining Global Energy: Lessons from the Hormuz Crisis" — sits squarely in this same week of reporting. A global energy system is being re-architected in real time, and the people writing the blueprints are not accountable to the people paying the bills.