Artificial intelligence is showing up in nearly every facet of professional and personal life, from chatbots embedded in everyday workflows to data centers taking root in suburban towns. Revathi Advaithi, chief executive of supply chain giant Flex, warns that the boom could come to a screeching halt if America's infrastructure continues to fall behind. And behind every model and every chip sits a quieter dependency that rarely makes headlines: the electricity to run it all.

“Most of us think about power only when the power goes off 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 Fortune 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.”

A decades-long build

Turning things around is no easy fix. Advaithi explained that building a power grid capable of meeting the country’s growing energy needs takes decades, while developing a chip takes only five years. That asymmetry is the crux of her argument: semiconductors and models iterate on product cycles, while grids advance on timelines shaped by safety review, regulation, and construction—meaning AI’s technology stack can mature faster than the physical system it depends on. As AI seeps into every corner of daily life, debate has centered on whether consumers and industries are ready for the technology. For the Flex CEO, the more urgent question is whether the nation’s power infrastructure can handle 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.”

A decade of deficit

Advaithi estimates that America will still be contending with a power gap over the next decade as frontier models continue to grow. Deploying all that compute requires a significant amount of power readiness, she said—and the United States is already operating in a deficit. That framing gives concrete weight to the Berkeley projection: data center demand is set to climb on AI’s timetable, while the grid-side response—new generation, upgraded transmission, modernized distribution—moves on a far slower one. She predicts the slump will persist unless the country speeds up its standards and approvals for innovation.

Keeping pace with AI’s innovation is also complicated by practical roadblocks. There are a “tremendous amount” of approval processes involved in creating new power technology, she said, and data centers are not acting with haste or employing new innovations either.

“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.”

Outpacing the grid

If the country’s lumbering processes continue 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.”

The markers to watch, on her telling, are procedural rather than technological: whether approval pathways for new power technology accelerate, whether data centers start adopting innovations already within reach, and whether generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades move from discussion to build-out. Those, in her view, are the levers that will decide whether the country’s AI ambitions rest on a grid capable of carrying them.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.