AI Industry Converges on Energy Wall Threatening Boom
Naveen Rao, CEO of Unconventional AI, forecasts that artificial intelligence will hit an energy wall in roughly three years unless chip efficiency improves by orders of magnitude. At the All-In Summit 2026, industry leaders converged on a striking consensus: the AI boom's biggest threat is not a sentient superintelligence but a shortage of electrons.
Rao claims his company can already demonstrate thousands or tens of thousands times more efficiency than existing computer chips. He argues that computers have always been built to go faster and never cared about power efficiency, but today computing will be power constrained at the global level.
Toby Rice, EQT CEO, quantified the immediate crunch, projecting a 20% to 40% surge in US natural gas demand driven by AI data centers. He warned that public polling shows 80% opposition to data centers, and American energy bills rose over 40% due to ESG constraints.
Rao also forecasts that software will become 'de minimis' as a source of value within two decades, with economics migrating to energy and hardware.