The Digital Economy Has a Physical Foundation
Bitcoin, stablecoins, tokenized assets, artificial intelligence, cloud services, and agentic commerce may appear to exist entirely within a virtual reality, but each depends on a vast ecosystem of sophisticated and interconnected physical components. Chips must be manufactured. Servers must be installed and cooled. Fiber must connect facilities to networks. Substations, transmission lines, generators, pipelines, and other industrial equipment must be built. Electricity has to reach the right place at the right time.
Energy enables computation, and compute powers a rapidly growing share of economic activity. Today, that economic activity can be measured in tokens. Two similarly named byproducts of complementary processes: blockchain infrastructure support (mining) and AI query processing (inference).
ENERGY → COMPUTE → TOKENS
The Digital Energy Council (DEC), a coalition within the Crypto Council for Innovation (CCI), is united around this relationship. DEC will bring together leading companies working across digital infrastructure, energy, artificial intelligence, and digital assets around a shared objective: building the energy foundation required for America’s digital future.
Energy Sets the Boundaries of Growth
Energy has always shaped economic capacity. Industrialization followed access to increasingly capable sources of power. Electricity extended that transformation into nearly every part of modern life.
Compute is becoming another major expression of the relationship between power and economy activity.
For decades, U.S. electricity demand grew slowly. Utilities, regulators, grid operators, and infrastructure developers planned systems around slower growth. Large-scale digital infrastructure is changing that pattern.
U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, about 4.4 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2026 update modeled a 2030 reference case of 649 terawatt-hours. That is an uncertain projection based on potential growth rates, but it illustrates the scale of the shift now confronting the power system.
Bitcoin mining was one of the first computational industries to develop around energy availability. Generative AI is expanding the scale, with developers seeking hundreds of megawatts and, in some cases, gigawatts of dependable power.
The Challenge Is Deliverable Power
The central constraint to forward progress is increasingly about where and when electricity can be delivered.
A region may have substantial generation and still lack the transmission, substations, or local infrastructure required to serve a large new campus. Data centers can move from investment decisions to construction within a few years. Major transmission projects, generation facilities, utility upgrades, fuel infrastructure, and permitting processes often require much longer.
That mismatch is becoming a major factor in where digital infrastructure gets built.
It also raises legitimate questions about reliability and cost. Large-load growth must rest on credible demand commitments, sound cost allocation, dependable grid planning, and infrastructure that protects existing customers from stranded investments. Communities must also contend with local questions involving land, water, noise, permitting, and development.
DEC’s policy approach begins from an understanding that abundant energy and infrastructure growth must be reliable, responsible, and durable.
What Crypto Has Already Taught the Energy System
Crypto offers useful operating experience because bitcoin miners were among the first large digital loads to participate directly in power markets. Mining facilities can often locate near available energy, reduce consumption quickly, and respond to market conditions. Texas has provided some of the clearest experience with large flexible loads, curtailment, and demand response.
That experience has limits when applied to AI.
A bitcoin mining operation can often curtail quickly because individual machines can stop with relatively little disruption to the underlying computational task. AI workloads vary widely. Some batch processing may be flexible. Model training can be scheduled, but should not be disrupted while underway. Real-time inference, cloud services, and mission-critical applications can have very different reliability requirements that to date require reliable uptime.
The lesson is narrower and more useful: some compute can become a grid resource when technical design, commercial incentives, and operating rules make flexibility possible.
Crypto infrastructure has also created assets that can transfer into AI and high-performance computing. Energized land, substations, interconnection positions, fiber access, and operating teams have already become valuable in several mining-to-AI conversions. The servers themselves may change. The power infrastructure often remains the scarce asset.
Why a Digital Energy Council
These questions involve utilities, regulators, grid operators, energy companies, data-center developers, and technology firms. DEC’s role includes connecting industries that have often approached these stakeholders separately.
Their interests increasingly revolve around the same practical problem: how to build and power large amounts of digital infrastructure on timelines that support economic growth.
DEC can provide a policy forum focused specifically on that intersection.
Its work will address generation, transmission, interconnection, grid resilience, large-load tariffs, cost allocation, permitting, infrastructure supply chains, and the emerging relationship between electricity systems and computational demand.
Energy and Compute Are Becoming Strategic Infrastructure
Compute capacity now supports scientific research, manufacturing, communications, finance, defense, software, and other critical activities. The energy system that supports that capacity is therefore becoming increasingly important to U.S. economic and national security.
Electricity supply, transmission networks, grid equipment, fuel availability, semiconductor production, and data-center development all fit within a common strategic conversation.
The United States enters this period with major strengths: abundant energy resources, leading technology companies, deep capital markets, sophisticated power systems, and a large base of industrial and engineering expertise.
Sustaining those advantages will depend on the country’s ability to generate and deliver far more power, build infrastructure faster, improve large-load integration, and expand domestic supply chains.
The Next Chapter of the Digital Energy Council
The Digital Energy Council’s members are already building both the digital economy and the physical systems that sustain it. Its policy agenda will focus on the constraints that determine whether new infrastructure can be built reliably, affordably, and at scale in the United States.
The digital economy will continue to grow through software, networks, models, markets, and digital assets. Every layer ultimately rests on physical infrastructure.
DEC’s next chapter begins here. Join us.
