Advancing Human Cognition and Decision-Making Through Energy Innovation in Data Infrastructure
Alphabet’s acquisition of Intersect on December 22, 2025 lands in a moment when AI is pushing data centers into a new era of energy intensity. The headline is corporate. The underlying story is infrastructure: if modern AI is “thinking at scale,” then electricity, cooling, and reliability are the physical limits that determine how far that thinking can go—and how dependable it is for real people who rely on it for decisions. It’s easy to treat energy and cognition as separate worlds. One is wires and transformers. The other is attention, judgment, and mental effort. But they connect in practice: the stability and speed of data infrastructure can either reduce friction (less context-switching, fewer interruptions, faster access to information) or amplify it (downtime, latency spikes, degraded performance, broken workflows). Over time, those frictions affect how humans plan, decide, and collaborate. TL;DR AI changes the energy equation: more compute density means...