Discover how power demand, automation, and data are reshaping logistics.
If you want to know what’s next on the business horizon, look to where the future shows up early: the supply chain.
In 2023, energy companies began seeing unprecedented power requests from technology firms, months before generative AI became a mainstream conversation. Joseph Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy, had handled large requests before. Philadelphia-area refineries needed 65 megawatts. Chicago steel mills required 140 megawatts. AI data centers were asking for between 1,000 and 5,000 megawatts in a single location, nearly 10 times larger than anything he had seen.
Dominguez shared that moment at Prologis’s GROUNDBREAKERS forum, where leaders across energy, logistics, technology, and infrastructure compare early signals before they surface in earnings calls or headlines. Those signals point to five shifts reshaping how goods move, buildings operate, and companies grow.
Artificial intelligence runs through all of them, revealing these shifts and accelerating them at the same time.
Rising power demand
AI is driving unprecedented growth, said Arun Majumdar, Ph.D., dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Without sufficient domestic power capacity, he warned, the next wave of AI development will move overseas, along with jobs, investment, and strategic advantage. To keep pace, Majumdar estimates the industry must grow power generation by 3% to 4% annually, compared with 1.1% historically.
Constellation Energy is restarting the dormant nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island through a 20-year, $16 billion deal with Microsoft. The scale of that investment underscores how power availability is becoming a defining constraint on growth.
Power access is now shaping where businesses can expand. It is as critical as location itself, said Melinda McLaughlin, Prologis’s head of research. Without sufficient electricity, even prime real estate becomes unusable.
Building grid resilience
For decades, supply chain strategy was optimized for the lowest cost and fastest route. That playbook is breaking down as energy, climate, and geopolitical risks introduce new points of failure.
Grid access faces bottlenecks ranging from interconnection delays to limited transmission capacity that can take years to resolve, said Rebecca Kujawa, former CEO of NextEra Energy Resources. Rather than wait, companies are increasingly building resilience directly into their operations through on-site solar and battery storage.
Energy availability is no longer a background operating detail. It increasingly determines where growth is possible.
Automation as infrastructure
Automation is no longer a productivity upgrade. It is becoming foundational infrastructure.
Amazon will soon have more robots than people, with 75% of deliveries already powered by robotics, according to Gina Chung, a vice president at Locus Robotics. New facilities are now designed around automation from the outset rather than retrofitted later. Facilities built without automation risk becoming obsolete faster than their leases expire.
AI is also reshaping retail decision-making. Crisp helps retailers forecast demand and optimize product placement, reducing waste and preventing empty shelves. The company has grown to 7,000 customers as retailers replace intuition with data-driven forecasting.
Data drives decisions
During the pandemic, data revealed inefficiencies that intuition had long missed. At the Port of Los Angeles, a digital platform showed that containers sitting on docks for eight days were likely to remain for weeks, said executive director Gene Seroka. After announcing a fine, container aging dropped 35% within a month, and the port moved record volumes in the months that followed.
The lesson was clear. Visibility does not just inform decisions. It changes behavior.
Most warehouses still lack real-time insight into inventory, equipment, and workflows. That is changing as companies invest in data infrastructure that enables continuous tracking and predictive decision-making. Even so, many shippers struggle to match shifting needs with fixed warehouse leases. Flexe addresses that gap with a network of partners offering on-demand warehouse capacity powered by years of proprietary data.
Evolving workforce
By 2030, the trucking industry could face a shortfall of more than 160,000 drivers, according to the American Trucking Associations. Uber Freight’s approach combines autonomous trucks for long-haul routes with human drivers managing local deliveries.
Across industries, automation is being used less to replace workers and more to absorb labor shortages and redesign work itself. In agriculture, Western Growers CEO Dave Puglia said a 30% labor shortfall has pushed growers toward robotics, freeing workers from physically demanding tasks while creating higher-skilled roles.
Solutions for tomorrow
The most promising solutions blend existing infrastructure with new technology. Others push supply chains into entirely new domains.
Water freight predates trucks by centuries, but cities are rediscovering it as congestion worsens. New York City’s Blue Highways initiative is developing waterways for autonomous electric vessels that could move freight without adding trucks to already strained bridges.
In the air, Elroy Air’s autonomous cargo aircraft has attracted more than $3 billion in demand for 1,500-plus aircraft from companies including FedEx, despite not yet operating commercially. Space-based manufacturing represents another frontier, with research showing that certain materials can only be produced in microgravity.
“Supply chains used to be a back-office function,” said Flexe CEO Karl Siebrecht. “Today, they’re where the future shows up first.”
That future is unfolding at forums such as GROUNDBREAKERS, where leaders debate the constraints and trade-offs shaping the next decade of business.
The full conversations from the forum are now available to watch on demand, offering a deeper view into the signals emerging well before they reach the headlines.
Note: This content was created by Prologis.