The Landscape as One Machine
The single most common error I see is reading an AI-infrastructure project through one lens and mistaking that lens for the whole. Power, capital, the physical build, the people who staff and sign, the policy and fiscal envelope, and the community that lives next door are not six separate stories. They are six faces of one machine, and they move each other. A cheap megawatt that no one will permit is not cheap. A signed lease with no transformer is a press release, not a data center. The framework you are about to learn treats these forces as a coupled system, because that is what they are. Read them together or misread them apart.
Knowledge check
Why does the framework insist on reading power, capital, build, people, policy, and community as one coupled system rather than as separate factors?
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Because each force sets the terms for the others: a constraint that looks solved in isolation (cheap power, a signed lease) can be nullified by a coupled constraint (no permit, no transformer). Only the coupled view predicts what actually gates a project, since the binding constraint usually emerges from the interaction, not from any single factor.