How Leaders Navigate Generative AI
It's 'build baby build' against the world, and a rising chance of a recession. With a deep dive on AI leadership strategy.
🎧 Audio Intro: 7 minutes, 45 seconds.
Lately I’m fairly curious about how leaders, CEOs and C-executives are seeing Generative AI in running their business, so I asked
of the Newsletter Leadership in Change for his take. He’s passionate about helping solopreneurs, business leaders, startup founders, and nonprofit leaders maximize their impact in an AI-driven world.Leadership in Change
The playbook for leaders who want to get it right with AI:
The Big Picture
I can’t believe it’s been 100 years (the 1920s) since the Electrification boom and bust bubble, and I wonder what we will experience with the AI Infrastructure set-up we have in the 2020s, whereas back then before electricity faded (as per the Conversation) from a red-hot tech sector into invisible infrastructure, the world went through profound social change, a speculative bubble, a stock market crash, mass unemployment and a decade of global turmoil.
This week the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI computing demand was up substantially, after participating to the tune of $2 Billion in an extension of a $20 Billion funding round by xAI, the OpenAI competitor by Elon Musk. In October where the likes of OpenAI, Oracle and xAI are going into substantial debt and SVP deals to fund their AI Infrastructure ambitions in what is mostly considered circular and vendor financing aimed to boost the demand for compute, stock prices and meet future capacity.
This is leading to a variety of interpretations of how this might work:
What happens when artificial intelligence becomes both the economy’s primary engine and its potential Achilles’ heel? How should leaders and CEOs respond to such a situation? Harvard economist Jason Furman recently said that AI investments accounted for nearly 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025.
The Energy Wall is approaching - a major U.S. compute bottleneck
But with America racing towards an energy bottleneck, what could go wrong? Morgan Stanley projects a 36 GW shortfall in U.S. data-center energy supply over the next three years 1 — the equivalent of building 30 new nuclear reactors, or one-third of America’s entire fleet. That’s a lot!
The Generative AI boom might have one hundred years later, it’s own electrification crisis with some creative SVP debt going on. Shall we call it, the bust of 2029? An era where a 19-year old genius can get funding to build supermemory for AI, I’m both intrigued and horrified what we are racing towards. As if almost in rebellion, the AI bull market races ahead faster even as the AI bubble media headlines seemingly got a little louder around September heading into October, 2025.
As prophets assure us that it’s an AI boom not a bubble, the savage AI Infrastructure roll-outs are incredible to behold. OpenAI and AMD just signed a multibillion-dollar deal for 6 gigawatts of compute, but we have no idea where the power will come from - nor is it clear what kind of Silicon Valley consensus we are dealing with here. We are betting on things like upending our entire legal system, without the capital or the electricity to build the infrastructure.
At a time when AMD had to give part of its company to OpenAI and Anthropic might have to do a mega deal with Billionaire Tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries over in India just to keep up. What of the leadership of this AI era? The art of the deal is becoming a question for the world’s Billionaire elites. There is uncertainty, urgency, debt and frankly, question of real ROI.
The cost of ‘Build Baby Build’
Utilities are reporting the need for about 60 gigawatts of new power, or six large cities’ worth, by the end of the decade (just over four years from now). The demand for compute will obviously lead to more debt and rushed projects. In the state of Virginia alone, permits were filed for 54 new data centers in Virginia in the first nine months of 2025, per a Business Insider tally. With SVP deals to hide the debt from official books and creative vendor financing, the new normal is looking rather curious.
AMD issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares, for up to 10% stake in the company. Meanwhile Amazon had 177 data centers built or in construction nationwide by the end of 2024, according to the BI analysis. The new planned data centers in Virginia would grow Amazon’s fleet to 205, a 15% increase. There is no end in sight to the AI Infrastructure frenzy.
The trillion dollar race to build it is on - but what are we building it for exactly? Sriram Krishnan, a senior White House policy advisor on artificial intelligence, appeared onstage at an event in Washington last month in September, 2025 - Trump wants deals and construction.
“Let’s make sure we build our infrastructure,” Krishnan said. “’Build, baby, build’ is what we tell people.”
Although on the other hand, what are we trying to hide here exactly?
As reported by Fortune and others, U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was almost entirely driven by investment in data centers and information processing technology, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman. Excluding these technology-related categories, Furman calculated in a Sept. 27 post on X.com GDP growth would have been just 0.1% on an annualized basis, a near standstill that underlines the increasingly pivotal role of high-tech infrastructure in shaping macroeconomic outcomes.
All of which certainly begs a lot of questions around the state of leadership and AI. From the Government to the highest reaches of Silicon Valley and the global elite. What kind of blood will be spilled in the Machine Economy that is coming is harder to say. How much will the debt of players like Oracle, Meta, xAI, OpenAI or CoreWeave come into play? Of course for today’s article, the leadership that we will be talking about in today’s guest contributor deep dive is of another variety altogether and one more specific for the moment: I’ll turn it over to Joel.
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