BySandy Carter,

Contributor.

Sandy Carter, COO at Unstoppable, Top 10 Microsoft MSN AI Entrepreneur

Dec 22, 2025, 09:36am EST

The Grinch Is Trying to Steal Your AI Christmas And The Blockchain Fix (Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)

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Yes! This was supposed to be the year AI changed everything.

Boardrooms buzzed with plans for AI agents handling customer service, managing supply chains, even making investment decisions. CEOs stuffed their wish lists with visions of 10x productivity. The presents were under the tree, beautifully wrapped in hype.

But there's a Grinch on the mountain, and he's eyeing all those shiny AI gifts.

His name? Infrastructure. And he's coming for Christmas.

The AI Energy Crisis Nobody Planned For

Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, recently told Congress that AI could eventually consume 99% of all power generation. And that kind of sounds abstract until you hear in The Street, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella admit his company has AI chips sitting in boxes they can't plug in. There's literally nowhere with enough electricity to run them.

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Data centers in Nvidia’s own hometown sit empty, waiting for power that hasn’t been built yet. And according to Yahoo Finance, OpenAI's Sam Altman warns that if cheaper energy arrives at scale, companies locked into current power contracts could be badly burned.

The industry built the engine before building the fuel supply.

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The AI Trust Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Energy is only half the problem.

I recently spoke with researcher Gerard Rego, who explained something most business leaders have never heard: ask the same AI the same question twice, and you might get different answers. I’m not talking about hallucinations but different answers because the underlying math is inherently unstable.

Gerard Rego identifies seven categories of trillion-dollar businesses emerging from this shift: from deterministic compute manufacturers replacing today's chips, to reasoning framework provides building new operating systems for intelligence, to knowledge marketplaces where verified proofs and decision logic are bought and sold. The total market potential, he argues, exceeds cloud, mobile, semiconductors, biotech, and internet infrastructure combined.... More

Gerard Rego

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The chips running today's AI were originally designed to make video game graphics look pretty. They prioritize speed over precision. Every calculation introduces tiny rounding errors that compound in unpredictable ways.

For writing a catchy email subject line, who cares? For an AI agent approving a $500,000 purchase order, those wobbles become expensive mistakes.

His solution is Deterministic AI. What is that? It’s a system that’s architected from the ground up for reproducible, verifiable reasoning rather than probabilistic guesswork. Rego sees this crisis as an opportunity. His framework identifies seven categories of trillion-dollar businesses emerging from this shift: from deterministic compute manufacturers replacing today's chips, to reasoning framework providers building new operating systems for intelligence, to knowledge marketplaces where verified proofs and decision logic are bought and sold. The total market potential, he argues, exceeds cloud, mobile, semiconductors, biotech, and internet infrastructure combined.

Why Your CFO Should Pay Attention To These AI Risks

Think about what businesses are actually asking AI to do now. Not just answer questions, but make decisions. Approve transactions. Manage inventory. Screen candidates. Negotiate with suppliers.

Now imagine your auditor asks: "Why did your AI system approve this vendor?" And you can't answer.

Not because you're hiding something, but because the AI itself can't reproduce its own reasoning.

The same inputs might yield different outputs tomorrow. Since there’s no paper trail. that’s not a technology problem but a governance nightmare.

Where Blockchain Comes In To Help AI

Here's where an unlikely solution enters.

Blockchain’s superpower isn’t Bitcoin.

It's boring, beautiful consistency.

Run the same transaction on a thousand computers, get the exact same result every time. Everything is recorded, timestamped, and unchangeable. That's the opposite of how AI works today and it might be exactly what AI needs.

According to the Origin Trails, Turing Award winner Dr. Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, puts it plainly: "We live in a time of abundant connectivity and, alas, abundant misinformation. The Decentralized Knowledge Graph is an evolving tool for finding the truth in knowledge."

Companies are already building this infrastructure. OriginTrail, working with partners including Microsoft, Oracle, and Swiss National Railways, has created a system where AI decisions get recorded as verifiable "knowledge assets."

Sentient, co-founded by Polygon's Sandeep Nailwal (one of my employers partners) and backed by $85 million from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, is pioneering "Loyal AI" which are models with built-in fingerprinting that lets communities verify legitimate use and enforce ownership.

Sentient is pioneering "Loyal AI" which are models with built-in fingerprinting that lets communities verify legitimate use and enforce ownership.... More

Sentient

In chatting with Sandeep Nailwal in Dubai, he put it: "When AGI emerges, it should be community controlled and community owned to guarantee its loyalty."

When the auditor comes knocking, you have receipts.

What This AI Issue Means For Your Business

The power crisis is real, but solvable. The trust crisis is real, and solutions are emerging.

The companies that thrive won't be the ones with the fanciest AI. They'll be the ones who can actually prove their AI works.

Before you unwrap all those AI initiatives this season, ask yourself:

Can I trust these answers?

Can I prove how they were reached?

Can I reproduce them when regulators ask?

If the answer is no, the Grinch might just win.

The good news? The AI infrastructure to answer yes is being built right now.