Time to Power
The AI industry's key bottleneck is shifting from compute availability to "time to power" — the lengthy process of building and energizing data center infrastructure. Physical constraints like power generation, permitting, and construction timelines now limit AI scaling more than funding or GPU supply.
Background
- Clouded Judgment is a popular newsletter by Jamin Ball covering cloud software (SaaS) markets, valuations, and public company financials.
- "Time to Power" is a concept from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) partner David George: the time between when a customer starts using a product and when they realize its full value. Shorter time-to-power means faster adoption and less churn.
- The post compares this metric to the older "time-to-value," arguing that modern AI and cloud products must demonstrate impact almost instantly because switching costs are low and competition is fierce.
- Ball uses public SaaS company data (e.g., Snowflake, Datadog, GitLab) to show that the highest-growth companies tend to have the shortest time-to-power, suggesting this is a key driver of efficient growth in the current market environment.