Introduction
In early 1848, Swiss settler John Sutter was building a water-powered sawmill on the American River in Coloma, California, when his carpenter, James Marshall, found flakes of gold glistening in the streambed. Sutter and Marshall swore a pact of secrecy about their discovery and agreed to become partners. But news of the find soon spread far and wide, triggering the seven-year California Gold Rush, during which 300,000 gold-hungry prospectors swarmed the area to make their fortunes.
Although an estimated $2 billion in gold was extracted during this period, most of the prospectors went home either emptyhanded or worse off than when they arrived. James Marshall never reaped the financial rewards of the boom, and John Sutter—in a bitter irony—was forced into bankruptcy after prospectors overran his land, looted his property, and stole his livestock.
The real winners of the Gold Rush were entrepreneurs like Samuel Brannan, publisher of The California Star newspaper. Spotting a lucrative opportunity beyond the gold itself, Brannan bought vast quantities of picks and shovels and marked them up by as much as 400%. In the process, Brannan became California’s first millionaire without ever getting his hands dirty.
History has a funny habit of repeating itself. More than 170 years on, a modern-day Gold Rush is unfolding—not on the goldfields of California, but in the corridors of Silicon Valley. When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, it sparked a global frenzy that has entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors jostling for position in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.
The AI Gold Rush may be less chaotic than its 1848 forerunner, but there are similarities: opportunities are being unearthed and swiftly seized, and value is being created and captured. Companies are racing to adopt AI-driven business models, investors are injecting billions into AI startups, and almost everyone has an opinion on where this technology is headed.
The ink is still wet on the story of AI, but the opening chapter has made one thing clear. AI’s ravenous appetite for compute has made the power sector a key protagonist. AI feeds on compute, and power enables this entire infrastructure.
As AI-based apps proliferate, the compute-intensive AI models that power them rely on thousands of clustered GPUs in data centers, which need exponentially more energy than the technologies that preceded them.
The power ecosystem is scrambling to meet data centers’ ravenous appetite for energy—all against the backdrop of the green transition and net-zero commitments. But the amount of energy needed to power today’s generative AI applications already exceeds what renewable sources alone can deliver.
To stand a chance of keeping up with demand on this scale, massive investment is needed across the value chain. These opportunities go well beyond the AI firms and the hyperscale data center operators, into an extensive array of “picks and shovels” opportunities.
The invasion of Iran in February 2026 has shone a spotlight on energy supply chains and their downstream industry structures. Globally, countries have varying levels of energy independence, from those that produce fossil fuels domestically to those that have a high level of renewable power integrated into their grid.
The focus on energy supply chain independence and sovereignty is set to escalate, accelerating the implementation of renewable and nuclear energy in many countries. Ultimately, more power to the grid is a positive for the AIenergy nexus; indeed, this shift could catalyze government action to reduce “time to power.”
In this paper, we focus on the broad array of investment opportunities that are being created by AI power demand. The foundational role of power in this dynamic will be an enduring theme, aligning it well with the longer investment timeframe of private markets investors. Coupled with the complexity of its supply chain and the regulatory and sovereignty considerations involved, the AI-energy nexus is opening opportunities for market participants from lenders to real estate investors and from private equity to venture capital to unlock one of the most transformative innovation cycles of our lifetime.
