AI is disrupting services. What does that mean for power demand?

AI is still in the foothills of enterprise adoption, but the infrastructure buildout required to support it is already reshaping energy markets, capital allocation, and industrial policy. Data centers are driving demand for new generation and transmission, while billions of dollars flow into the hardware and software needed to train and run increasingly powerful models.  That makes energy infrastructure a big constraint in the AI buildout race. Data centers require more power generation, transmission, grid capacity, and additional physical infrastructure; all major investments. And those energy systems will have impacts on the cost of running potentially more power-hungry frontier AI models. That’s a lot of uncertainty even before considering the economic transformation still to come. If AI moves beyond software and begins to fundamentally change how services like law, accounting, insurance, and finance are delivered, it could reshape a far larger part of the economy and create a new wave of demand for both digital and physical infrastructure. In this episode of Critical Capital, Alfred Johnson sits down with Jake Saper, a partner at Emergence Capital and an early investor in enterprise software and AI infrastructure. Saper argues that the biggest transformation from AI may not happen inside software companies at all. Instead, it could reshape the much larger services economy, creating a new category he calls AI-native services (AINS). Saper explains why he believes companies built from scratch around AI may have an advantage over traditional service-business roll-ups, and why the biggest challenge for these companies is delivering their services with AI rather than simply adding more human labor. The conversation also explores the increasingly blurry line between software and physical infrastructure.  Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.