AI seems to be springing up in nearly every facet of people’s professional and personal lives, from chatbots installed into workflows to data centers taking root in suburban towns. But Revathi Advaithi, the CEO of supply chain giant Flex, warns that it could all come to a screeching halt if America’s infrastructure continues to fall behind.
“Most of us think about power only when the power goes off in our house or things like that. But we have a grid that’s just not ready for what’s in front of us,” Advaithi told executive editorial director Diane Brady onstage at Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, California.
“When I think about AI readiness, everyone’s focused on technology: whether it’s semiconductors or frontier models and things like that. And I’m focused on, ‘Hey, if you don’t get the energy infrastructure and the grid ready, forget all the frontier models and forget all the semiconductors’…Because you don’t have a country that can take advantage of all of that.”
And the leader says it’s no easy fix to turn things around. Advaithi explained that it takes decades to build a power grid capable of meeting the country’s growing energy needs; meanwhile, developing a chip only takes five years. As AI seeps into every nook and cranny of life, people may question whether we’re ready for the tech from a consumer and industry standpoint. But for the Flex CEO, the real concern is whether the country’s power infrastructure is ready for the transformation. By 2030, around 11.8% of all U.S. electricity could go to data centers, according to a 2025 Berkeley study.
“We’re far behind, and it’s going to take us a long time to really innovate,” she said. “Power doesn’t seem to have changed since the [Thomas] Edison days, and so it really is going to take a long time to innovate and change what’s happening in the power infrastructure”
Advaithi estimates that America will still have a power gap in the next decade as the frontier models continue to grow. Deploying all that compute requires a significant amount of power readiness, she said—and the U.S. is already in a deficit. She predicts that there will continue to be a slump over the next decade unless the country speeds up its standards and approvals for innovation. However, there are roadblocks to keeping pace with AI’s innovation; there are a “tremendous amount” of approval processes in creating new power technology, she said. Plus, data centers aren’t acting with haste or employing new innovations.
“It is no joke when I talk about the fact that energy and power innovation hasn’t happened in a long time, and it hasn’t happened because there’s safety issues, there’s regulatory issues,” the Flex leader explained. “You don’t want to mess around with things like power, because it impacts people’s lives.”
If the country’s lumbering process continues to stall power progress indefinitely, Advaithi warned, AI’s growing appetite for electricity threatens to outpace the infrastructure needed to sustain it.
“Unless we move forward pretty fast with new generation—upgrading our transmission lines which are all old and outdated, really getting to next generation distribution—we are going to be operating in a deficit,” she said. “We don’t want that deficit to impact what will happen in AI.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com