Introducing “Watt’s Law” and The Power Supply Ceiling on American Innovation

CSIS Renewing American Innovation director and senior fellow Sujai Shivakumar sits down with CSIS senior associate Maryam Khan Cope to discuss an exciting new concept: that of “Watt’s Law.” For most of the modern digital economy, the United States has enjoyed a quiet structural advantage where computing kept getting better while the energy cost of using it generally fell. That was not just a happy coincidence. That assumption is collapsing, and countries that can mobilize power and compute at speed are on track to surpass the United States.

Watt’s Law is the idea that the next decade of progress will be driven less by transistor shrinkage alone and more by how effectively the U.S. can convert watts of electricity into useful computation through better full-system design, including accelerators, memory, networking, software, distribution via edge computing, and operations. Watt’s Law is not a law of physics and not a guaranteed doubling schedule. It is a rule-of-thumb about what is increasingly determining real-world AI capability, which is system efficiency and utilization under power constraint. Watt’s Law can restore a macroeconomic tailwind, if the U.S. treats the energy and compute link as a first-order national priority rather than a technical afterthought.

This event is made possible through general support to CSIS.