Grayscale Research Director: Computing power is becoming a new scarce digital asset
On September 24, Zach Pandl, the research director of the cryptocurrency asset management company Grayscale, published an article in the column The Stack stating that in the wave of artificial intelligence, the demand and supply paths for the computing power required to train, run, and operate models are diverging. Grayscale believes that this imbalance favors owners of already powered and operational computing capacity and brings growth-oriented investment opportunities.Zach Pandl stated that digital demand can expand instantly, but physical infrastructure such as electricity, data centers, chips, memory, and cloud services takes years to approve, access, and build. When artificial intelligence agents perform multi-step tasks, they may consume 5 to 50 times more compute tokens than typical chatbot interactions, and increased application layer activity will transmit to the underlying computing infrastructure.The article cites data from the International Energy Agency and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, stating that data centers are expected to account for about half of the growth in electricity demand in the United States by 2030, and new projects may take more than five years to connect to the grid. Even if electricity is secured, permits, specialized labor, electrical equipment, cooling systems, GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, and networks are still needed. Continuous value will flow to power producers, data center operators, and artificial intelligence cloud service providers that can convert electricity into computation.