Somewhere around 2030 a building will hum through the night with nobody inside it, and the only lit room in that story will be the one where the humans eat.
That is my forecast. I would like to defend it over dinner, and I would like to lose.
The buildings are coming whether we argue or not. The grid is the slower animal. More than 2,060 gigawatts of generation and storage sat in US interconnection queues at the end of 2025, and only 13 percent of the capacity that asked between 2000 and 2020 ever reached commercial operation, after a median wait of more than five years (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up). In PJM, the largest US grid operator, a megawatt-day of capacity went from $28.92 to $329.17 in two auctions (Utility Dive, July 2025). A GPU generation turns over in about two years. A grid connection takes more than five. Everyone at the table already knows this. What nobody knows is who signs.
So, on Friday, October 30, 2026, I am hosting fourteen people in a private room in San Francisco. Doors at 6:30 PM PT, seated at 7:15, done by about 10:00. Dinner and wine are on DCXPS. There are no slides and there is no pitch, from me or from anyone, and the room runs under Chatham House rules: use what you hear, never say who said it, who employs them or who else was in the room.
The machines are about to do the labor. What stays with us is the thinking, and thinking has always gone best at a long table late in the evening. Leonardo kept his notebooks at one table, where the flow of water and the anatomy of a wing shared a page. Our page holds power, silicon, robots, capital and the companies that will one day run without us. Several threads will cross it before the cheese arrives, and I intend to lose control of most of them.
The threads I expect
Which gets built first, the power or the compute, and whose signature carries it.
When the first data center runs ninety days without a human inside, and what proof we will accept that it did. A log nobody reads, or a sensor nobody trusts.
Whether a handful of humans and a fleet of software agents can operate gigawatts, and what such a company must never be allowed to do.
Where the waste heat of intelligence should go: into the night air, or into greenhouses that feed the town next door.
Whether Europe builds its own or rents it, and what renting does to a continent’s nerve.
And the one none of us can answer yet: what we are building all of this for, once the infrastructure starts funding the intelligence it hosts.
Who should sit there, and why
This is not a dinner for people who comment on AI capacity. It is for people who shape it. Founders and researchers at the labs. The people who buy or run compute at clouds, neoclouds and the enterprises that finally need it. Energy developers who count in substations. Roboticists. The people who will have to write rules for a building with nobody in it. And the investors behind all of them, from Europe and the US. Two seats are community seats, for people who ask better questions than I do; if you read this newsletter with a question that keeps you up at night, that is your seat.
Why come. Because the next fifteen years of this industry will be decided by a few hundred people who sign things, and they almost never sit at the same table without a term sheet on it. A room with no pitch is the only room where someone admits what they got wrong, and that admission is worth more than any deck. Dinner #1 was on Saturday, April 11, fifteen at the table. This one is smaller on purpose.
The host. I am Jiri Fiala. I run DCXPS, where I design intelligence factories, modular, liquid-cooled AI data centers that go up on power that already exists, and the kind of company that runs them, built so that software carries the work and four humans hold the signatures. I write about all of it here. My forecast is that by 2030 nobody works inside the building. Come tell me where it breaks.
How it works. Request a seat here: https://luma.com/axjsq5fn. Give your name, company, role and the thread you most want the table to take on. Requests close Wednesday, October 28 at 6:00 PM PT. Approval is by hand, and you hear from me the day after. The address goes to approved guests only. If your employer caps hospitality, say so on the form and we sort it. A write-up of the ideas, without names or employers, follows here in AI of the Coast.
The building will not miss us. The table might.
Jiri