New Delhi, March 23 -- At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued one of the most pointed challenges yet to the artificial intelligence industry, not from a critic or a regulator, but from one of its most powerful architects. Speaking alongside BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink, Nadella warned that AI's voracious appetite for energy would only be tolerated by society if the technology delivered measurable, real-world results.

"We will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, and private sector competi...