Big Tech Committed $700 Billion. The Grid Said Nothing.

U.S. manufacturing expanded for five straight months through May, the longest streak since 2022. The ISM Manufacturing PMI hit 54 in May, its highest level in four years. New orders rose to 56.8. June's reading drops at 10 a.m.

Much of the expansion is tied to building things that consume electricity. Data center construction starts hit $49.5 billion through April, roughly four times the year-ago pace. Power infrastructure starts rose 21% in the first quarter. Gas turbine orders surged 70% in 2025 and backlogs are growing.

Morgan Stanley projects the U.S. faces a 49-gigawatt power shortfall by 2028. Gartner says power shortages will restrict 40% of AI data centers by 2027. The equity market is pricing unlimited AI growth. The energy grid is pricing a hard physical limit. Both are placing real capital. Only one timeline can be right.

The JOLTS report released yesterday showed 7.594 million job openings in May, the highest since May 2024 and well above the 7.3 million Wall Street expected. The labor market, by the headline, is running hot.

But the quits rate tells a different story. It has been stuck at 1.9% for nearly a year, well below pre-pandemic norms. Workers are not leaving because they do not see something better. Hires stayed flat at 5.2 million even as openings climbed. Companies are posting positions. Workers are not moving into them.

A labor market with record openings and frozen mobility is a market where the bottleneck is not demand. The bottleneck is somewhere else. In this economy, the somewhere else is physical capacity: grid connections, transformers, skilled trades. The jobs exist. The infrastructure to fill them does not.

Nike reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings of $0.72 per share last night against a Street estimate of $0.12. Revenue came in at $10.97 billion, slightly above forecasts. Gross margins jumped nearly 9 percentage points to 49.2%.

Read the fine print. Nearly $986 million of that margin came from a one-time tariff refund after the Supreme Court struck down several of the administration's global duties. Strip that out and adjusted EPS was $0.20. The stock fell as much as 8% after hours before recovering to about a 3% decline.

CEO Elliott Hill said the results are not there yet. Greater China revenue dropped 12%. Digital sales fell by double digits. The one-time refund masked a business that is still shrinking in its most important channels. If your IRA holds a Dow index fund, you bought more Nike at Monday's record close. The tariff windfall does not repeat.