How America’s “AI Manhattan Project” Can Power a New Energy Operating System

By Christina Alfonso, Executive Director and President Council on Global Competition and Innovation – CGCI; Senior Fellow, The Intelligence Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center

America is building something big.

In late 2025, the United States launched the Genesis Mission—an AI and high‑performance computing effort designed to accelerate breakthroughs across national priorities, including energy capacity and national security. The program is ambitious by design: federal compute, national labs, AI models, robotics, and curated datasets are organized to speed discovery and engineering where it matters most. It has already been cast as America’s “AI Manhattan Project” in a bid to roughly double U.S. scientific productivity over the coming decade.

To maximize Genesis’s impact, it must operate not only as a breakthrough science platform but as the operating system for U.S. energy. In a country with world‑class research, deep capital markets, and a Department of War planning for contested logistics and resilience, utilities and developers are still working on an energy system held together by legacy processes. The missing layer is a shared, scalable backbone that connects these actors into a coherent energy‑security system—that is the role Genesis is positioned to play.

The Energy Capacity Crisis

For more than a decade, U.S. electricity demand looked flat, but that is changing dramatically. Load is now rising as AI data centers and compute infrastructure scale faster than grid build‑out timelines. Electrification is shifting vehicles, buildings, and industrial processes from fuels to electrons, while reindustrialization and onshoring pull new manufacturing demand back onto U.S. networks. What began as an “energy transition” story is now an energy capacity and throughput story with direct national security implications. In a competition defined by industrial strength, technological edge, and military readiness, electricity is the foundational strategic input.

Yet while demand accelerates, the system that moves power is constrained. A massive volume of proposed generation and storage sits in interconnection queues—far beyond what today’s transmission system and planning processes can absorb quickly. Projects stall, timelines stretch, attrition rises, and even where capital is ready, permitting fights and cost‑allocation debates slow the build.

For the Pentagon, it is also a defense industrial base (DIB) problem in disguise. The same substations, interconnection queues, and contested transmission corridors that decide where fabs and data centers can run at scale also decide whether depots, ports, and bases can add the capacity and resilience their missions demand. This energy layer sits in a blind spot between infrastructure policy and defense acquisition, so it rarely appears as a requirement, program of record, or budget line tied to specific defense outcomes. It is central to warfighting and surge capacity, but still largely unrecognized in how it is governed and resourced.

Platform vs Operating System

Genesis was set up to be a federal AI‑enabled science platform, integrating compute, data, models, and tools across the national laboratory system and beyond. In early 2026, the Department of Energy translated that mandate into Genesis AI challenges with aggressive targetsacross grid planning and operations, nuclear deployment, facility autonomy, and high‑consequence engineering workflows. Some of these challenges already call for interoperable digital twins, streaming data standards, audit trails, and agentic workflows.

But there is a difference between a platform for science and an operating system for energy security. A platform is successful when it produces results. An operating system is successful when others can reliably build and run on top of it, at scale, under constraints, and within real decision processes.

The Genesis mandate and its early challenge set already lean in this direction. The task now is to make “operating system” the organizing principle for how the platform is built, governed, and adopted.

Three Design Questions Genesis Can Use to Maximize Its Impact

Thinking of Genesis as an operating system surfaces a set of design questions that Genesis leaders and their partners now have a timely opportunity to answer.

The first is who counts as a user. Today’s narrative understandably centers on national labs and academic researchers, but they are not the actors who approve interconnection requests, issue permits, dispatch power plants, or allocate capital. The highest‑leverage users are grid operators and utilities, state and regional regulators and permitting authorities, Department of War installation and resilience teams, and the developers and investors who decide what actually gets built. If these users cannot use Genesis in their normal workflows, it will produce knowledge but not throughput.

The second question is what interfaces it exposes. In software, an operating system matters because it standardizes interfaces. For energy security, those interfaces translate into common ways to ingest grid, load, and reliability data; to run interconnection and transmission studies with reproducible assumptions and outputs; to evaluate nuclear, fusion, and data‑center projects against shared security, resilience, and performance benchmarks; and to generate decision‑grade evidence packages that regulators, the Department of War, and investors can trust.

The third question is who governs the platform and how. If Genesis becomes the operating system for critical energy decisions, governance needs to be as intentional as the technical architecture. Governance decisions must answer who sets priorities when agencies disagree, who vets external partners and under what criteria, how conflicts are resolved across federal, state, and regional boundaries, what becomes “standard” when trade‑offs are unavoidable, and who is accountable when those standards fail.

Early U.S. electric power systems illustrate the stakes. Regional grids emerged with mismatched rules and processes, and their patchwork structure stalled national scaling. Only when governance frameworks—starting with the state commissions of 1907 and culminating in the 1935 Public Utility Act—established shared standards did the grid evolve from scattered experiments into coherent national infrastructure. That experience proved in practice that without governance there is no grid.

The Role of the National Labs

The national laboratories are central to making Genesis work. They should be the core developers and maintainers of models and standards, the stewards of digital twins, neutral validators of tools proposed by industry, and hosts of testbeds where high‑risk ideas can be proven safely. In that role, they can enable and inform applied decision‑making across utilities, regulators, the Department of War, and industry, even though they are not the ones formally issuing permits or allocating capital.

The goal is not to centralize intelligence inside labs, but to push reliable, vetted intelligence to where decisions actually happen: public utility commissions, grid control rooms, military base planning offices, and capital committees. If Genesis becomes a lab success story with limited adoption outside the lab ecosystem, the United States will still face slow interconnection, fragmented transmission build‑out, and misaligned incentives. The opportunity is to turn the labs’ technical excellence into shared infrastructure that lowers friction and de‑risks investment for everyone else.

Designing Genesis as an Operating System for Energy Security

Ultimately, Genesis will succeed as an operating system for energy security only if it makes it easier for operators, regulators, and investors to say “yes” to the right projects. If Genesis is built as the OS layer—secure kernel, standardized interfaces, reference workflows—external partners can build the financing structures, bankability frameworks, and resilience packages that move from policy intent to steel in the ground. Success will show up as less friction across institutions: faster interconnection and planning, higher conversion of queued projects into built capacity, and measurable gains in resilience for critical loads and defense facilities.

As President of the Council on Global Competition and Innovation (CGCI), this is where I see market‑facing national security organizations like ours adding particular value. Institutions operating at the intersection of capital markets, critical technologies, and national security can translate Genesis workflows into investable theses and scalable public–private partnerships, mobilizing private capital and operating expertise alongside federal leadership while reducing the amount of direct public funding required. That role depends on having a federal platform built from the outset to interface effectively with markets. What remains is to decide what Genesis is for and to design it accordingly.

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As an investor, Graham has backed more than 25 startups, led New Hampshire’s largest angel investor network, and served as a General Partner in a venture fund focused on early-stage companies in New Hampshire.

In parallel with his civilian career, Graham has served as a Naval officer, leading multiple innovation initiatives. He was Deputy Director of NavalX, the U.S. Navy’s innovation cell; Director of Global Technology Scouting and Co-Investments at the Office of Strategic Capital within the Office of the Secretary of War; and a technology scout with Task Force 59 under the U.S. Navy’s Central Command.

Graham, a New Hampshire native, is also deeply involved in civic and nonprofit work, having served as a Director or Advisor to organizations such as New Hampshire Public Radio, the St. Anselm College Ethics in Governance Program, and the Business School at Southern New Hampshire University.

He holds a B.A. in Political Science with High Distinction from the University of California, Berkeley; an M.A. in Public Policy from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy; a J.D. from Duke University School of Law; and a Certificate in Transnational Law from Duke and the University of Geneva Faculty of Law.

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Jesús Mantas

Jesús Mantas

Former Global Managing Partner, IBM
Board Director, Biogen, IFF, and National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD)

Jesús Mantas is the former Global Managing Partner responsible for Business Transformation Services in IBM. Prior to this, he led IBM Business Consulting, IBM Global Process Services, and IBM GBS Latin America. Before IBM, he was a Partner in the High Technology practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, and worked at Procter & Gamble in Spain.

He serves as the Chair of Compensation and Management Development of the Board of Director of Biogen Inc.(NASDAQ: BIIB), as well as a Board Director of IFF (NYSE: IFF) and NACD. He was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council and serves on the Boards of HITEC and NACME, non-profits focused on leadership development of diversity in technology. He is the emeritus chair of IBM’s Hispanic Diversity Council.

Jesús holds degrees in Telecommunications, Software Engineering, and Business Administration, was a professor at University of California, Irvine Graduate School of Management, and served as an officer in the Air Force of Spain.

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Glen Dodson

Glen Dodson

Job Title, Cyberistics

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David Ulevitch Portrait2

David Ulevitch

General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

David Ulevitch is an entrepreneur and investor. As a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he leads the firm’s American Dynamism practice, which focuses on investing in companies advancing American interests — including supporting builders in areas such as defense, national security, public safety, nuclear and aerospace. David sits on the boards of Alloy Automation, Anduril, AnyRoad, Charthop, Firstbase, Flock Safety, Orderful, Rewatch, Skydio, Superhuman, Supermove, Vitally, and WorkBoard. David has written extensively on the role of technology in advancing American interests, including how nuclear technology can untether our military, the future of public safety and how the U.S. can rewire the Pentagon for a new era. David was previously the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, a cloud-delivered security service that was acquired by Cisco in 2015 for $635 million. While at Cisco, David was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Security — a $2.4 billion annual revenue business with more than 5,000 team members — where he oversaw the company’s global cybersecurity strategy, product portfolio, and business. Prior to OpenDNS, David founded EveryDNS, an authoritative DNS service, and grew it into the world’s largest free DNS service. He sold it to Dyn (now Oracle) in 2010.

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John M. B. O'Connor

John M. B. O’Connor

Chairman and CEO, J.H. Whitney Investment Management

John M. B. O’Connor is CEO of J.H. Whitney Investment Management, LLC. Previously, Mr. O’Connor was Chairman of JP Morgan Alternative Asset Management. Mr. O’Connor is also CEO of Whitney Strategic Services and Whitney Data Services. Mr. O’Connor serves on the Board of Directors of numerous companies including Oceus Networks, LLC., Sequoia Holdings, Inc., and Boon Logic, Inc.

Mr. O’Connor is a Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where he lectures on the Economics of National Security. He served as a member of the U.S. Department of War Business Board from 2005 to 2021 and as a Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army for New York from 2014 to 2019. He is a recipient of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Air Force Distinguished Public Service Award and the Department of the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award. Mr. O’Connor earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Tulane University and a Master’s in Business Administration degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

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Sherif Nahas

Sherif Nahas

Director of Private Equity, Ford Foundation

Sherif works at The Ford Foundation, where he manages approximately $7 billion in private investments, including venture capital, private equity, real estate, and natural resources. He previously managed private investments for the University of Virginia endowment, and before that worked at BankBoston and Sand Hill Capital. Sherif started his career as an engineer and product strategist at The Ford Motor Company. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.S. and M.E in Aerospace Engineering, and received an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan.

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Byron Loflin

Byron Loflin

Global Head of Board Advisory & Nasdaq Center for Board Excellence, Nasdaq

Byron Loflin is the Global Head of Board Advisory at Nasdaq where he leads the governance team in driving board and governance effectiveness. Byron founded the Center for Board Excellence (CBE) in 2010 and was CEO until it was acquired by Nasdaq in 2019.

Prior to CBE, Byron was the CEO and president for two private companies between 1992-2009. Along with speaking on and teaching corporate governance effectiveness, Byron is a graduate of James Madison University (BA) and Harvard Business School (OPM) and several HBS Executive Education Certificates including Havard’s Board Effectiveness program.

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Gen. David Stilwell

General David Stilwell

Ret. General USAF; Fmr Assistant Secretary of State (Asia)

Brig Gen (Ret) David Stilwell is the Fox Fellow for Future Pacing Threats at the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Institute for Future Conflict. In this role, he educates cadets and faculty on the growing military threat presented by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including its use of political and information warfare to undermine democracies. His teachings help prepare future officers for the challenges they will face immediately after commissioning. Stilwell most recently served as the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of EastAsian and Pacific Affairs from 2019 to 2021. Before that, he served in the U.S.Air Force for 35 years. Stilwell enlisted as a Korean linguist in 1980, served as a fighter pilot and commander for 25 years, and was later the Defense Attaché in Beijing. He retired in 2015 as the Asia advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He speaks Korean, Chinese, and some Japanese.
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Adam Segal

Ira A. Lipman Chair in Emerging Technologies and National Security, and Director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An expert on security issues, technology development, and Chinese domestic and foreign policy, Segal was the project director for the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force reports Confronting Reality in Cyberspace, Innovation and National Security, Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet, and Chinese Military Power. His book The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age (PublicAffairs, 2016) describes the increasingly contentious geopolitics of cyberspace. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs, among others. From April 2023 to June 2024, Segal was a senior advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, where he led the development of the United States International Cyberspace and Digital Policy. Before coming to CFR, Segal was an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. There, he wrote about missile defense, nuclear weapons, and Asian security issues. He has been a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has taught at Vassar College and Columbia University. Segal is the author of Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge (W.W. Norton, 2011)
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Nazak Nikakhtar Portrait

The Honorable Nazak Nikakhtar

Partner and National Security Chair, Wiley Rein LLP
Former Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Commerce

The Honorable Nazak Nikakhtar brings over two decades of experience in international trade and national security to help clients succeed in the domestic and global marketplace. Through leadership roles in the U.S. government and private sector, Nazak has leveraged her valuable insights into the expansive range of U.S. and international laws, regulatory and policy processes, and federal agency resources to achieve clients’ business objectives. 

 

From 2018 to 2021, with unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Nazak served as the Department of Commerce’s Assistant Secretary for Industry & Analysis at the International Trade Administration (ITA). Nazak also served the duties of the Under Secretary for Industry and Security at Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). In these roles, Nazak was the agency’s primary liaison with U.S. industry and trade associations, and she shaped major initiatives to strengthen U.S. industry competitiveness, promote innovation, and accelerate economic and job growth.

 

As one of the key national security experts in the U.S. government, she developed and implemented innovative laws, regulations, and policies to safeguard strategically important technologies, strengthen the U.S. industrial base, and protect the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States. As the Department’s lead on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), she played a key role in shaping U.S. investment policy. As the head of the agency’s trade policy office, she advised the U.S. government on legal and economic issues impacting critical technologies, advanced manufacturing, financial services, e-commerce, data privacy, cybersecurity, critical minerals/rare earths, and energy competition. Finally, as the federal agency’s lead on supply chain assessments, Nazak spearheaded the United States’ first-ever whole-of-government initiative to evaluate and strengthen supply chains across all strategic sectors of the economy.

 

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R.P. Eddy

R.P. Eddy

CEO, Ergo

R.P. Eddy is the CEO of Ergo, a geopolitical and economic intelligence firm known for forecasting critical world events. Leaders of allied governments and the world’s most consequential global businesses rely on Ergo to navigate what the firm calls “The Fastest Year in History”—with each year faster still.

Previously, R.P. served as a Director at the White House National Security Council and as a senior U.S. and UN diplomat. He has represented the U.S. in peace negotiations, played a role in the (flawed) creation of the International Criminal Court, and led attempts to recover American hostages. He was an initial architect of the Global Fund, which has since been credited with saving over 50 million lives; the UN team was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize. Recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as one of “America’s most respected national security experts,” R.P. was also named a “Global Leader for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum.

R.P. co-authored the award-winning bestseller Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes (HarperCollins). His advocacy work spans leading counterterrorism programs for the NYPD and LAPD, promoting Western industrial competitiveness with DARPA, advocating for safe social media, and supporting the responsible development of AI. He has testified before Congress, spoken at the UN General Assembly and the Nobel Prize Summit, and is a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

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Christina Alfonso

Executive Director, CGCI

Christina Alfonso is a senior advisor to leaders across government and industry, specializing in national security, economic competitiveness, and emerging technology policy. As the Executive Director of the Council on Global Competition and Innovation (CGCI), she leads an initiative championed by the U.S. Department of War and private sector executives to advance resilient, market-driven security investments and foster strategic growth. As a Senior Advisor at DARPA, Christina prioritized developing public-private partnerships and advised on strategies to strengthen the U.S. defense innovation ecosystem.

Previously, as co-founder/CFO of Novata, a Microsoft and S&P-backed technology platform, Christina enhanced private market transparency through non-financial data reporting. As co-founder/CEO of Madeira Global (2012-2020), she pioneered values-based investment solutions for the private equity and credit sectors.

She is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School Senior Executives in National and International Security program. Christina holds an M.B.A. from ESADE Business School (Spain) and a B.S. in Finance and Economics from Fordham University. Christina is a trustee and treasurer of the RWJBH Monmouth Medical Center Foundation and has served on the advisory boards of the Milken Institute Young Leaders Circle, PathNorth, and the Women’s Society for the Economy and Society. She has extensive international experience, most recently in São Paulo, and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.