---
id: "quote-energy-not-renegotiated"
type: "quote"
source_timestamps: ["§ The Great Value Loop", "¶9"]
tags: ["energy-markets", "infrastructure-constraints"]
related: ["concept-ai-industrial-economics", "question-grid-constraint-timeline"]
speaker: "Yinuo Tang and Eric Yanfei Zhao"
speakers: ["Yinuo Tang", "Eric Yanfei Zhao"]
sources: ["futures"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-futures"
originDay: 2
articleStem: "hbr-nm-101-energy-strategy-ai"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/06/your-company-needs-an-energy-strategy-for-ais-next-phase"
sourceTitle: "Your Company Needs an Energy Strategy for AI’s Next Phase"
---
# Energy is local and slow to build

> "Energy is not an input whose price can simply be renegotiated annually. It is local, permitted, slow to build, and politically contested."

— [[entity-yinuo-tang]] and [[entity-eric-yanfei-zhao]] (§ The Great Value Loop, ¶9)

## Significance
Explains *why* energy behaves differently from the digital inputs of prior eras — the physical stickiness that makes it the durable Era-4 bottleneck. Grounds [[concept-ai-industrial-economics]] and motivates the open question [[question-grid-constraint-timeline]].