When the Curve Bends: AI’s Infrastructure Reckoning

Diminishing returns in model scaling threaten to strand GPUs, megawatts, and capital

Over the last 18 months, the story of AI has been told as a straight line: bigger models, more compute, more power. But that curve may already be bending. And if it is, the first place you’ll see the effects isn’t on a leaderboard or a benchmark. It’s in the electrical grid.

Large-scale AI systems, particularly transformer-based large language models (LL…