Silicon Tundra

Somebody is going to build the electricity the next twenty years run on, and somebody is going to build the machines that drink it. That is the whole race. I want both of them built here.

The companies at the front of the artificial-intelligence business worked this out a while ago. The thing that decides the next decade isn’t clever code. It’s power. Cheap, abundant, reliable power, in quantities the grid was never designed to hand anybody. The Electric Power Research Institute expects American data centers to roughly double their share of the country’s electricity by 2030. That demand has to be generated somewhere, by someone, and right now nobody is certain where.

I don’t think most Alaskans have connected that to us yet.

Everything they told us was a problem

For about thirty years the world ran on a single idea: flat is fast. Make everything everywhere, ship it just in time, buy it cheap, don’t ask too many questions about where it came from. That world is closing. Supply chains snapped. Countries started dragging their factories home. Allies and rivals began carving the map into camps again. The polite word is multipolar. The plain version is that everybody suddenly cares a great deal about who actually makes things, and who has the energy and the minerals to make them with.

Here’s the funny part. Almost everything people used to call Alaska’s problem turns into Alaska’s edge.

Too cold? Cold is a structural advantage for anything that runs hot, which is exactly why the industry already puts hardware in northern Sweden and Iceland. Power is the big line on that bill and cooling is the smaller one, but they point the same direction, and we have more of both than anyone.

Too remote? On a flat map we look like the end of the line. On a globe we are the short way between North America and Asia, and as the ice moves, lanes that were closed are opening.

Too dependent on resources, in an age that had decided resources were a little embarrassing? The age changed its mind, fast. Up on the Seward Peninsula north of Nome sits Graphite Creek, which the U.S. Geological Survey calls the largest known graphite deposit in the country. Graphite goes into every battery made. Down in the southeast, Bokan Mountain holds the kind of heavy rare earths the defense industry is desperate to buy anywhere but China. We have the gas, the hydro, the geothermal, the minerals, the water. The world spent twenty years pretending it needed none of it.

The supply chain that runs through Beijing

And the stakes run well past Alaska. China refines more than 90 percent of the world’s battery-grade graphite and roughly 90 percent of its rare earths. Not mines them. Refines them. We drifted into a position where the magnets in our fighter jets and the batteries in our trucks run through the one country we are supposedly racing. Washington noticed late and is scrambling to stand up a supply chain that doesn’t start in Beijing. Alaska is one of the few places in America that can actually help. That isn’t a mining brochure. It’s national security with a Nome zip code.

An energy state with an energy shortage

Energy is the strangest case of all, because we are an energy state staring down an energy shortage. The North Slope holds roughly 35 trillion cubic feet of known gas with no line to carry it, while down in Southcentral, where most of us actually live, Cook Inlet is running thin and the utilities are planning to import. Importing gas. To Alaska. Your heating bill climbs in the middle of one of the richest basins on earth for no better reason than that we never built the thing that connects what we have to where we live.

I worked those files at Revenue. The money that wants to build here is real, and it is already circling. What it asks about first is never the geology.

We have looked worthless before

If that sounds like hype, remember that we have been underestimated before. In 1867 the country bought Alaska for $7.2 million, about two cents an acre, and the papers back east howled. Seward’s Folly. Seward’s Icebox. A ridiculous purchase of a frozen nothing. That frozen nothing went on to produce gold, oil, fish, and a good share of the nation’s fortune. We have a habit of looking worthless right up until the moment we turn out to be indispensable.

Which brings me to our second habit, and it is not as flattering. We sit on top of the wealth and let other people pour the concrete. Fifty years of talking about a gas line. At some point that stops being prudence and starts being a decision. We ship out raw and ship in finished and call it an economy, an economy that builds careers everywhere but here. So more people leave this state than move into it, year after year, thirteen years running now, the longest streak since 1945. Our own kids pack the truck because the future they wanted got built somewhere warmer, and we tell ourselves there was nothing to be done.

There was always something to be done. We kept choosing to manage the decline and calling it responsibility. That isn’t caution. It’s a failure of nerve.

We know it can be done, because we did it. In the 1970s Alaska built the pipeline and it remade the state: the jobs, the revenue, and eventually the Permanent Fund itself, the dividend that still lands in your account every fall. That fund exists because once, Alaska saw a window and built for it instead of studying it to death.

What I actually want

So here is what I actually want, and I’m not going to be coy about it. Build the power here, and then keep it here. Sell the electrons to the people who need them, and put the machines that need them on our side of the meter. Refine the ore instead of shipping it out raw for somebody else to add the value to. Silicon Tundra: server halls on the Railbelt running on Alaskan gas and Alaskan water, cooled by weather we already have and currently treat as a liability.

I’ve heard every objection. It’s expensive to build here. The projects are enormous. The timelines run long. All true, and none of it is an argument for doing nothing, because the things that make it hard are the same things that make it valuable. If it were easy somewhere warmer, it would already have been done somewhere warmer.

Get it right and it looks like this. Revenue that doesn’t live or die on a single barrel. Work that doesn’t end when the field does. And a kid out of Palmer or Bethel who can build a career and raise a family here instead of in Phoenix.

The most expensive option on the table is still the one we keep picking, which is nothing.

A window like this doesn’t open often. For the first time in a generation the world wants what Alaska has, in quantities only a few places on earth can deliver, and it is willing to pay for it. That is the biggest opening this state has seen since the pipeline.

I’m going to spend a while here writing about how this actually works, in plain English: the energy, the dividend, the gas line, the minerals, the map hardly anyone is reading. Not the press-release version. The honest one, because the people who see a thing clearly first are usually the ones who get to shape it.

The next world runs through Alaska. We can build it, or we can watch it go past on the other side of the glass.