Chapter 12: The Path Forward From Here

Sean M. Walsh
Dec 7, 2025
8 min read

Updated: 7 hours ago

History forgets the skeptics. It remembers the intrepid builders, who blaze new trails, and manifest their God-given inspiration. Join me in scaling Solar Computing Clusters, initiating the AI Manhattan Project, and enjoying the benefits that will follow.

Wilbur and Orville Wright, December 17, 1903

"Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better." -Harry S. Truman

The Case Is Closed

Across eleven chapters, I have built a case that I hope anticipates and addresses all reasonable objections.

I began with a historical analogy from 1947. Eleven million soldiers returned from World War II to discover that America had no homes for them. The traditional building industry could not scale to meet the need. Some veterans camped in tents beneath billboards that promised them a future they could not touch.

William Levitt looked at an empty potato field on Long Island and saw something no one else could see. Not farmland. Not limitation. Opportunity. He invented the modular tract home, and the American suburb; mass-produced homes, assembly-line efficiency, standardized systems.

Within a few short years, the housing crisis was over. In its wake came national highways, an automotive explosion, appliance manufacturers, shopping centers, and the greatest expansion of middle-class prosperity in human history. Truly, the American dream.

The parallels to our present American infrastructure shortage is striking.

Today, America's shortage is not homes, but electicity. The age of artificial intelligence has arrived, and it is starving for power. The traditional grid, built for a bygone era, cannot feed it.

Remember What's Really At Stake

Chapter 2 made the case that few Americans understand: this is not just a business problem and opportunity. This is the greatest national security crisis in generations.

The race for AI supremacy will determine who dictates the world order for the next century. Whoever controls the most powerful AI systems will possess advantages in military capability, economic productivity, scientific discovery, and diplomatic leverage that no combination of traditional power can counter.

China understands this. Its government has made AI supremacy a national priority, coordinating industry and intelligence services in ways American antitrust law prohibits. The CCP has been expanding its national electricity infrastructure for decades, while the US grid has stalled.

The OPM data breach of 2015, 22.1 million federal employee records, was not a crime of opportunity. It was a well orchestrated act of strategic international warfare, conducted without a single soldier crossing a border.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, who has seen the frontier of AI development from inside OpenAI, warns that we are building the most powerful technology in human history as though it were a commercial product rather than a Manhattan Project. He predicts the American government will eventually respond with the mobilization this moment demands. But, we must mobilize now, and we must select the correct strategy to beat the rapidly ticking countdown timer.

And here is the terrible irony: we’ve built the best AI hardware, but we lack the power to run it.

The most brilliant algorithms, the most advanced chips, the most ambitious national programs; all of them mean nothing if they cannot be energized. The race for AI supremacy may not be won by whoever has the best models. It will be won by whoever can actually power their computing clusters.

The Thing Behind The Thing

Chapter 3 revealed the awkward truth that Satya Nadella finally admitted in November 2025: "The biggest issue we are now having is not a compute shortage, it's power... You actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that you can't plug in. In fact, that is my problem today."

Nadella is one most powerful men in global technology. Microsoft enjoys a $3.8 trillion in market capitalization, over $280 billion in annual revenue, and $100 billion of cash on their balance sheet. And, yet… they confess owning warehouses of GPUs sitting in boxes waiting for electricity.

Clearly, this is much more than a “canary in a coal mine”.

This appears to be "the thing behind the thing". While headlines focus on GPU advancement and hundred-billion-dollar chip deals, the actual constraint on AI advancement is the electricity required to run the computing clusters.

The real race is not for the silicon, not for the software. The race is for the kilowatt-hours, and China is pulling ahead at a breathtaking pace.

The numbers are stark: America faces a 44 gigawatt power shortfall by 2028. That's enough electricity to power 33 million American homes. This enormous gap must be closed in roughly two years.

And legacy solutions cannot close it. Their obstacles are insurmountable. The timelines do not align. Their infrastructure cannot scale.

Cascading Constraints

Chapters 4 through 8 documented the litany of obstacles standing between America and AI supremacy:

The US Grid Instability And Deferred Maintenance: 100 year-old, $2 c-hooks dropping cables and leading to $16 billion dollar disasters, with 3 million more hooks in use nationwide. $2 trillion in deferred maintenance. Millions of transformers well-beyond their design lifespan. A doubling of grid outages over the past decade. US transmission expansion grinding to a halt. And, the situation is worsening by the month.

The Interconnection Queue Crisis: Over 2,600 gigawatts of applications sit waiting in line; more than twice the entire U.S. theoretical generation capacity. The average wait time has stretched beyond five years. Some projects wait seven or eight. The queue has become a graveyard of ambition.

The Transformer Shortage And Sabotage: Lead times for large power transformers have exploded to 3-4 years. Only 20% are manufactured domestically. Atop all this, we see the alarming rise of unauthorized, remote-operated, kill switches in China-sourced substation transformers.

The Turbine Backlog: Natural gas turbines; the fastest conventional path to new generation; face wait times exceeding 30 months, and up to 7 years in many cases. By the time they arrive, the race for AI supremacy will be over with the winner declared.

The Community Opposition: From Prince William County to Loudoun County, Virginia, from rural Ohio to California, communities are successfully blocking datacenters, which they see as extractive; consuming power, water, and land while providing few local benefits. Permitting battles that delay projects for years have become the norm.

The Supply Chain Vulnerability: Critical materials; transformers, rare earth elements, copper, specialized components—are concentrated in China or in regions China dominates. The same nation racing us for AI supremacy controls the supply chains we need to compete.

The Labor Deficit: There are not enough high-voltage electricians, linemen, and specialized workers to build grid infrastructure at the speed required. The workforce cannot be grown and trained fast enough.

Each obstacle compounds on the others. Transformers require specialized parts from vulnerable supply chains. Turbines require natural gas pipelines that face their own permitting delays. Interconnection queues create backlogs that push projects back before they can even order the equipment they need. System gridlock appears imminent.

Time To Power - Perhaps A $500 Billion Opportunity

The flip-side of every problem is an opportunity, and chapter 9 quantifies just how big this electricity crisis opportunity is, in financial terms: a 44-gigawatt gap translating to $103 to $588 billion in stranded revenue.

This is hyperscalers with $400 billion, and growing, in annual CapEx budgets, desperate for capacity. This is Nvidia chips sitting in warehouses because Microsoft cannot power them. This is AI models falling behind due to electricity shortage.

Every month that datacenter capacity remains dark is billions in unrealized revenue. Every project delayed is market share surrendered. Every gigawatt unfilled is economic demand that flows to whoever can deliver what America's grid cannot.

This financial opportunity is historic. But it is also fleeting. The window to begin is measured in months, not years. And it will close, one way or another, when a global AI winner emerges.

The Elegant Solution

Chapter 10 describes the only apparent solution: Solar Computing Clusters.

The architecture is elegant in its simplicity. Off-grid solar microgrids, arranged and sized appropriately to run a matched computing cluster, charge the batteries, and provide sufficient surplus power to achieve continuous uptime all year. Recyclable battery systems, far more economical than Lithium systems. Use an intelligent management system to optimize power consumption across the daily, and annual solar curves. Monetize surplus PV generation through intermittent workloads like Bitcoin mining, turning what would otherwise be curtailed energy into incremental revenue.

The economics are compelling: sub $40/MWh for a 100% renewable, baseload microgrid. Cheaper than restarting Three Mile Island. And unlike grid power, these costs are locked in for over 30 years. No fuel volatility. No rate increases. No regulatory surprises.

But the real advantage is speed, and scalability. Time-to-power.

While traditional data centers wait 5-7 years for grid interconnection, Solar Computing Clusters deploy in under 12 months. No transformer backlog. No interconnection queue. No permitting gauntlet.

Every obstacle documented in this book, every constraint, every delay, every stranded project, Solar Computing Clusters bypass them all.

Real, Patented, And Operating In New Mexico For Three Years

This is not a whitepaper.

Two different versions of my Solar Computing Clusters have been operating in southern New Mexico for three years. Off the grid. Real panels. Real batteries. Real computing loads. Real performance data. Continuous uptime.

The technology is protected by multiple issued patents, with additional, complimentary patents joining my Licensing Association.

The research is peer-reviewed. The economics are validated. The commercial-scale systems are operational. What remains is execution at gigawatt-scale, and this appears to be the moment to begin exactly that.

The Win-Win-Win

Chapter 11 revealed something remarkable: the fastest solution is also the cleanest.

Solar Computing Clusters deliver life cycle emissions 15-30 times lower than fossil alternatives. They consume zero water for power generation, critical as data centers increasingly compete with communities for this essential resource. They can help avoid up to 4.1 billion tons of CO₂ emissions through 2030, according to the Scale Microgrids analysis.

For compute operators, this translates to ESG compliance that meets 2030 regulatory requirements today. Access to green financing and sustainability-linked credit facilities. Insulation from carbon pricing exposure, that will only increase, not to mention growing chorus of “greenwashing” allegations against legacy systems. Community acceptance rather than opposition.

This is the rarest kind of business proposition: one where doing well and doing good are the same thing. Where the profitable choice is also the ethical choice. Where the fastest solution is also the cleanest.

Compute operators win. System Developers win. The planet wins.

My Call To Action

In August 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Roosevelt warning that Nazi Germany might be developing an atomic bomb. Einstein was not certain a bomb was possible. He only knew that the consequences of being wrong were too catastrophic to risk.

That letter launched the Manhattan Project, the largest scientific and industrial mobilization in human history. It succeeded because American leadership understood the stakes. They understood that hesitation was not caution; it was surrender.

We now face a similar choice.

The scientists and researchers who understand AI best are warning us that we are building something unprecedented, something that will reshape the world order as decisively as nuclear weapons did. They are warning us that our adversaries are racing toward the same goal. They are warning us that the infrastructure constraints we face could determine whether America leads or follows in the century ahead.

And they are warning us that we are running out of time.

Solar Computing Clusters appear to be the answer. Not the only answer imaginable, but the only answer that exists, today, proven and ready to deploy, in the timeframe the crisis demands.

There is no serious argument against this path. There is only the question of who will take it. I invite you to join me.

History does not remember the skeptics. It remembers the pioneers.

The 44 Gigawatt shortage calls. The time for action is now.

For more information on Solar Computing Clusters, my patent portfolio, and partnership/acquisition opportunities, email me, or contact me on LinkedIn.