This is the final piece. And if you’ve followed this series from the beginning, you already know more about what’s really happening in the economy than 99% of the people watching cable news.
On Day 1, I showed you the Iran crisis – a potential military strike that could push oil to $100 or beyond, with CSIS mapping out four escalation scenarios that all end with higher energy prices.
On Day 2, I walked you through the tariff chaos – the Supreme Court striking down Trump’s IEEPA-based tariffs, his immediate retaliation with a new 10% global levy, and the 150 days of maximum uncertainty now facing every business in America.
On Day 3, I explained the rare earth crisis – China’s near-total control over the critical minerals that power our military, our technology, and our economy, with prices already up 41% in 2026 as the market wakes up to the danger.
Today, I need to tell you about the fourth crisis. And then I’m going to show you how all four of them fit together in a way that the financial media is completely missing.
The fourth crisis is electricity.
More specifically, it’s the collision between America’s insatiable demand for artificial intelligence and the physical reality that our power grid cannot support it.
The Washington Post reported this week that Silicon Valley is building what amounts to a “shadow power grid” across the United States. Tech companies are constructing data centers with their own private power plants – natural gas turbines, solar installations, and in some cases, dedicated nuclear reactors – because the existing electrical grid simply cannot deliver the power they need.
One project alone – the GW Ranch in West Texas – will consume more electricity than the entire city of Chicago.
Let that sink in. A single data center complex. More power than Chicago.
And it’s not an outlier. It’s the new normal.
AI training and inference are driving data center development from 25-megawatt facilities to gigawatt-scale campuses that run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The International Energy Agency estimates that global data center electricity consumption will nearly triple – from 176 terawatt-hours to 580 terawatt-hours – by 2028.
Tech companies aren’t waiting for the grid to catch up. They’re building around it. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are all racing to secure dedicated power sources – including nuclear energy – because they’ve done the math, and the math says the grid can’t deliver.
Here’s why this is a crisis and not just a business story.
When the world’s most powerful companies start building private power infrastructure, they’re not just solving their own problem. They’re making everyone else’s worse.
Every megawatt that goes to a data center is a megawatt that doesn’t go to homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses. And when demand outstrips supply – which it already is in some regions – electricity prices go up. For everyone.
A Chinese green energy tycoon – the founder of Envision, one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers – warned this week that the AI boom will “plunge millions of people into energy poverty” unless renewable energy deployment accelerates dramatically.
Energy poverty. In 2026. In the richest country on Earth.
This isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening. Utility costs are rising in data center corridors across Virginia, Texas, and the Southeast. Local communities are fighting data center construction because they’ve seen what happens to their power bills when a facility the size of an airport drops onto their grid.
Now watch what happens when you connect all four crises.
This is the part nobody in the financial media is talking about. And it’s the reason I wrote this series.
Crisis 1 + Crisis 4: Iran and the Power Grid. A military strike on Iran doesn’t just affect oil prices. It affects natural gas prices too – especially if LNG flows through the Strait of Hormuz get disrupted. The same natural gas that’s powering those private data center plants. The same natural gas that fills the gap when renewables fall short. A spike in natural gas prices doesn’t just raise your heating bill – it threatens the entire AI infrastructure buildout. And it pushes electricity costs higher for everyone.
Crisis 2 + Crisis 3: Tariffs and Rare Earths. Every solar panel, every wind turbine, every electric vehicle, and every data center power system requires rare earth elements and critical minerals. The tariff chaos makes importing these materials more expensive and less predictable. China’s export controls make them harder to get. And the combination means that building the energy infrastructure America desperately needs just got slower and more expensive at exactly the moment we need it to go faster and cheaper.
Crisis 3 + Crisis 1: Rare Earths and Military Readiness. If we strike Iran with Tomahawk missiles, every one of those missiles requires rare earth components. Components that flow through a supply chain China controls. The more we use, the more exposed we become. It’s a strategic paradox: the act of projecting military power depletes the materials we need to sustain it.
Crisis 2 + Crisis 4: Tariffs and AI Infrastructure. The data centers being built across America are full of imported components – servers, networking equipment, cooling systems, semiconductors. A 10% tariff on all global imports makes every one of those components more expensive. Which means the data centers cost more to build. Which means the electricity they need costs more to produce. Which means the AI services built on top of them cost more to deliver. The tariffs don’t just tax consumer goods. They tax the infrastructure of the future.
Do you see it now?
These aren’t four separate problems. They’re one interconnected system of vulnerabilities – and every crisis amplifies every other crisis.
Iran raises energy costs, which strains the power grid, which makes AI infrastructure more expensive, which increases demand for the critical minerals China controls, which becomes harder to secure because of tariffs, which makes everything cost more, which makes the economic impact of an oil shock even worse.
It’s a feedback loop. And we’re standing at the point where it’s about to accelerate.
So what do you do about it?
I’m not going to pretend there are easy answers. There aren’t. But there are clear principles that separate the investors who survive convergence events from those who get crushed by them.
Principle 1: Own the chokepoints, don’t depend on them. The companies that will benefit most from this convergence are the ones solving the vulnerability problems – domestic rare earth producers, energy infrastructure builders, AI power solution providers, defense supply chain companies. When the world realizes it can’t keep depending on fragile supply chains, the companies offering alternatives become the most valuable businesses on the planet.
Principle 2: Respect the safe havens. Gold just broke $5,000. Goldman Sachs says $5,400 by year-end. This isn’t a bubble – it’s a rational response to four concurrent risk factors. Central banks are buying at record levels. Private investors are following. When you can’t predict which crisis will escalate next, you own the asset that benefits from all of them.
Principle 3: Don’t wait for confirmation. By the time the financial media starts talking about “convergence,” the opportunity will have passed. The best time to position was a month ago. The second-best time is now. Gold is up. Rare earths are up 41%. Energy stocks are up. Defense stocks are up. The market is speaking – even if the headlines aren’t.
Nobody has mapped the convergence of these forces better than Porter Stansberry. His “1776 Moment” research lays out a detailed investment framework for exactly this kind of multi-crisis environment – including specific positions designed to benefit from the convergence rather than suffer from it. If this series has opened your eyes, his research is the next step.
And one of the companies at the intersection of AI infrastructure and the defense supply chain is SpaceX. Jeff Brown at Brownstone Research believes the upcoming IPO could be the biggest of the decade – and has identified a way for everyday investors to claim a stake before it goes public. His research is worth a look.
Here’s the bottom line.
We are living through a period of simultaneous, interconnected crises that most people are experiencing as separate news stories. The Iran headlines. The tariff debates. The rare earth concerns. The AI power demand. Each one gets its own segment on the evening news, its own column in the Wall Street Journal, its own thread on social media.
But they’re not separate. They’re one phenomenon – the unraveling of the fragile, interconnected global systems that have powered American prosperity for decades. And the investors who understand that – who position for the convergence rather than the individual headlines – will be the ones who come through this in the strongest shape.
I’ve spent four days laying this out for you. I hope it’s been useful. I hope it’s made you think differently about what you’re seeing in the news. And I hope it’s motivated you to take action – not out of fear, but out of clarity.
Because when you see the whole picture, the path forward becomes surprisingly clear.
Tom Anderson is the editor of Wall Street Watchdogs. This concludes his emergency four-part series, “The Four Crises Nobody’s Connecting.”
P.S. I want to leave you with one final thought. On Friday, the President of the United States canceled his weekend at Mar-a-Lago to sit in the White House and weigh a military strike on Iran – on the same day the Supreme Court struck down his tariff authority and he immediately signed new ones – while rare earth prices are up 41% and Silicon Valley is building private power plants because the grid can’t keep up. All of that happened on one day. Friday, February 20th, 2026. If that doesn’t convince you we’re living through a convergence event, I don’t know what will. Porter Stansberry called this convergence before most analysts even recognized it – don’t wait for the next headline, get positioned now.
P.P.S. If the rare earth crisis is what caught your attention most, Ian King’s “Mystery Metal” research dives deeper into the specific companies solving China’s mineral chokehold – including one breakthrough technology that could reshape the entire industry. And for those watching the broader market positioning opportunity, Stansberry’s latest analysis on the Mar-a-Lago Accord connects the geopolitical dots in ways I think you’ll find eye-opening.
