Hey {{first_name}} 👋
Quick one. This isn't the regular Secret Agent issue. The next one drops next week with the usual AI agents and research roundup.
But if you care about AI agents, you should care about the physical bottlenecks underneath them.
Agents do not scale because demos get better. They scale when compute gets cheaper, denser, and easier to deploy.
That depends on chips, memory, advanced packaging, networking, and power.
This week, the biggest bottleneck in AI infrastructure started moving from the chip factory to the electrical grid.
That is what my new weekly publication, The Chokepoint, tracks.
It is a free Tuesday read on the bottlenecks in AI infrastructure, published on Tessara Research.
Each edition answers three questions:
What is the biggest constraint in AI infrastructure right now?
Who benefits if that constraint gets worse?
What would prove us wrong?
Edition #1 is live.
The headline: power is now the constraint moving fastest.
Memory is still tight. Advanced packaging is still tight. But the pressure is starting to move from the chip factory to the electrical grid.
One signal we’re watching is hyperscaler power purchase agreements, or PPAs.
A PPA is a long-term electricity contract that lets companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google lock in power for future data centers. When those contracts get harder to secure, AI compute gets more expensive and harder to deploy.
And right now, hyperscalers are moving fast.
They are no longer being picky about the source of power. Wind, battery storage, gas, solar, nuclear. They are trying to secure every reliable electron they can find.
That matters because AI chips are only useful if the rest of the system is ready.
You can ship a million NVIDIA Blackwells into a data center site, but without substations, transformers, and long-term power contracts, they are expensive paperweights.
The bottleneck is moving. Electrons are becoming the hard part.
The full edition breaks down the constraint map across power, compute, memory, packaging, and networking, who captures the rent, what would flip the call, and the earnings to watch this week.
Subscribe to Tessara Research → (one-click subscribe) You’ll get one clear call every Tuesday on what is constraining the AI buildout, who benefits, and what would prove us wrong
Secret Agent stays exactly as it is. AI agents, the machine economy. The Chokepoint is the supply-chain side of the same story. See you next week. ✌️
- Teng