#143 - The Hidden Bottleneck Standing Between America and AI Dominance

Chip Cannon graduated from Tulane with a history and German degree, no burning desire to practice law, and a scholarship to study in West Berlin — where he'd find himself in a bar with friends the very night the wall fell. It took four years abroad, a near-expired LSAT, and a year and a half of temping to finally land at a small energy regulatory firm. He never looked back. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman speaks with Chip Cannon, partner at Hogan Lovells and adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School, about a 30-year career that has tracked almost perfectly with the transformation of the American power sector — from regulated monopoly to competitive markets, and now to the AI-driven data center boom. Cannon brings rare clarity to one of the most urgent infrastructure challenges of our time. A data center can take six months to build but six years to get powered — and regulatory complexity across 50 states makes that gap hard to close. He describes a site in northern Louisiana nearly the size of Manhattan, currently nothing but land and worker camps, that will require three new gas-fired plants just to operate. Beyond the energy world, Cannon shares a personal lesson from a toxic workplace that forced him to examine not just what others had done wrong, but what he owed himself — including self-forgiveness. His message to law students: careers are not linear, scrappiness has real value, and the path forward rarely looks the way you planned.