If you own an index fund, you own the bet.

The richest companies on earth plan to spend more than $700 billion this year alone on chips, buildings and power for artificial intelligence, built ahead of the customers who will use it. Your 401(k) holds those companies. Your electric company may be building for them.

It has happened before. In 1929 Samuel Insull, Thomas Edison's secretary turned the man who electrified Chicago, opened the largest power plant in the world on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was built for customers who had not yet arrived, with other people's money and his own fortune pledged inside the structure. Three years later the structure collapsed. The plant ran for eighty-three years.

Today a data center on the same ground is waiting for power. In North Dakota, a potato farmer's son broke ground on a $1.2 billion building with no tenant, waited nineteen months for one, and pledged his family's shares to a bank. In Louisiana, a utility is building gas plants for a single customer named Meta.

Historian and engineer David Stevens tells the two stories side by side, entirely from the public record: Insull's own speeches, Senate hearings, utility commission transcripts, SEC filings and the builders' own words. He shows why every great technology arrives before its payoff, why the gap is where fortunes break, and why the technology wins anyway, just not when anyone expects.

*Someone Is Going to Lose* is the story of the lag we are living in now, and what it means for your money.